War And Peace: Book 11 - CHAPTER XXXIV

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• Author: Leo Tolstoy

WHEN PIERRE, after running across courtyards and by-lanes, got back with his

burden to Prince Gruzinsky's garden, at the corner of Povarsky, he did not for

the first moment recognise the place from which he had set out to look for the

baby: it was so packed with people and goods, dragged out of the houses. Besides

the Russian families with their belongings saved from the fire, there were a

good many French soldiers here too in various uniforms. Pierre took no notice of

them. He was in haste to find the family, and to restore the child to its

mother, so as to be able to go back and save some one else. It seemed to Pierre

that he had a great deal more to do, and to do quickly. Warmed up by the heat

and running, Pierre felt even more strongly at that minute the sense of youth,

eagerness, and resolution, which had come upon him when he was running to save

the baby.

The child was quiet now, and clinging to Pierre's coat with her little hands,

she sat on his arm, and looked about her like a little wild beast. Pierre

glanced at her now and then, and smiled slightly. He fancied he saw something

touchingly innocent in the frightened, sickly little face.

Neither the official nor his wife were in the place where he had left them.

With rapid steps, Pierre walked about among the crowd, scanning the different

faces he came across. He could not help noticing a Georgian or Armenian family,

consisting of a very old man, of a handsome Oriental cast of face, dressed in a

new cloth-faced sheepskin and new boots; an old woman of a similar type; and a

young woman. The latter—a very young woman—struck Pierre as a perfect example of

Oriental beauty, with her sharply marked, arched, black eyebrows, her

extraordinarily soft, bright colour and beautiful, expressionless, oval face.

Among the goods flung down in the crowd in the grass space, in her rich satin

mantle, and the bright lilac kerchief on her head, she suggested a tender,

tropical plant, thrown down in the snow. She was sitting on the baggage a little

behind the old woman, and her big, black, long-shaped eyes, with their long

lashes, were fixed immovably on the ground. Evidently she was aware of her

beauty, and fearful because of it. Her face struck Pierre, and in his haste he

looked round at her several times as he passed along by the fence. Reaching the

fence, and still failing to find the people he was looking for, Pierre stood

still and looked round.

Pierre's figure was more remarkable than ever now with the baby in his arms,

and several Russians, both men and women, gathered about him.

“Have you lost some one, good sir? Are you a gentleman yourself, or what?

Whose baby is it?” they asked him.

Pierre answered that the baby belonged to a woman in a black mantle, who had

been sitting at this spot with her children; and asked whether any one knew her,

and where she had gone.

“Why, it must be the Anferovs,” said an old deacon addressing a pock-marked

peasant woman. “Lord, have mercy on us! Lord, have mercy on us!” he added, in

his professional bass.

“The Anferovs,” said the woman. “Why, the Anferovs have been gone since early

this morning. It will either be Marya Nikolaevna's or Ivanova's.”

“He says a woman, and Marya Nikolaevna's a lady,” said a house-serf.

“You know her, then; a thin woman—long teeth,” said Pierre.

“To be sure, Marya Nikolaevna. They moved off into the garden as soon as

these wolves pounced down on us,” said the woman, indicating the French

soldiers.

“O Lord, have mercy on us!” the deacon added again.

“You go on yonder, they are there. It's she, for sure. She was quite beside

herself with crying,” said the woman again. “It's she. Here this way.”

But Pierre was not heeding the woman. For several seconds he had been gazing

intently at what was passing a few paces from him. He was looking at the

Armenian family and two French soldiers, who had approached them. One of these

soldiers, a nimble, little man, was dressed in a blue coat, with a cord tied

round for a belt. He had a night-cap on his head, and his feet were bare.

Another, whose appearance struck Pierre particularly, was a long,

round-shouldered, fair-haired, thin man, with ponderous movements and an idiotic

expression of face. He was dressed in a frieze tunic, blue trousers and big,

torn, high boots. The little bare-footed Frenchman in the blue coat, on going up

to the Armenians, said something, and at once took hold of the old man's legs,

and the old man began immediately in haste pulling off his boots. The other

soldier in the tunic stopped facing the beautiful Armenian girl, with his hands

in his pockets, and stared at her without speaking or moving.

“Take it, take the child,” said Pierre, handing the child to the peasant

woman, and speaking with peremptory haste. “You give her to them, you take her,”

he almost shouted to the woman, setting the screaming child on the ground, and

looking round again at the Frenchmen and the Armenian family. The old man was by

now sitting barefoot. The little Frenchman had just taken the second boot from

him, and was slapping the boots together. The old man was saying something with

a sob, but all that Pierre only saw in a passing glimpse. His whole attention

was absorbed by the Frenchman in the tunic, who had meanwhile, with a

deliberate, swinging gait, moved up to the young woman, and taking his hands out

of his pockets, caught hold of her neck.

The beautiful Armenian still sat in the same immobile pose, with her long

lashes drooping, and seemed not to see and not to feel what the soldier was

doing to her.

While Pierre ran the few steps that separated him from the Frenchman, the

long soldier in the tunic had already torn the necklace from the Armenian

beauty's neck, and the young woman, clutching at her neck with both hands,

screamed shrilly.

“Let that woman alone!” Pierre roared in a voice hoarse with rage, and

seizing the long, stooping soldier by the shoulders he shoved him away. The

soldier fell down, got up, and ran away. His comrade, dropping the boots, pulled

out his sword, and moved up to Pierre in a menacing attitude.

“Voyons, pas de bêtises!” he shouted.

Pierre was in that transport of frenzy in which he remembered nothing, and

his strength was increased tenfold. He dashed at the barefoot Frenchman, and

before he had time to draw his cutlass, he knocked him down, and was pommelling

him with his fists Shouts of approval were heard from the crowd around, and at

the same time a patrol of French Uhlans came riding round the corner. The Uhlans

trotted up to Pierre, and the French soldiers surrounded him. Pierre had no

recollection of what followed. He remembered that he beat somebody, and was

beaten, and that in the end he found that his hands were tied, that a group of

French soldiers were standing round him, ransacking his clothes.

“Lieutenant, he has a dagger,” were the first words Pierre grasped the

meaning of.

“Ah, a weapon,” said the officer, and he turned to the barefoot soldier, who

had been taken with Pierre. “Very good, very good; you can tell all your story

at the court-martial,” said the officer. And then he turned to Pierre: “Do you

know French?”

Pierre looked about him with bloodshot eyes, and made no reply. Probably his

face looked very terrible; for the officer said something in a whisper, and four

more Uhlans left the rest, and stationed themselves both sides of Pierre.

“Do you speak French?” the officer, keeping his distance, repeated the

question. “Call the interpreter.” From the ranks a little man came forward, in a

Russian civilian dress. Pierre, from his dress and speech, at once recognised in

him a French shopman from some Moscow shop.

“He doesn't look like a common man,” said the interpreter, scanning

Pierre.

“Oh, oh, he looks very like an incendiary,” said the officer. “Ask him who he

is,” he added.

“Who are you?” asked the interpreter in his Frenchified Russian. “You must

answer the officer.”

“I will not say who I am. I am your prisoner. Take me away.” Pierre said

suddenly in French.

“Ah! ah!” commented the officer, knitting his brows; “well, march

then!”

A crowd had gathered around the Uhlans. Nearest of all to Pierre stood the

pock-marked peasant woman with the child. When the patrol was moving, she

stepped forward:

“Why, where are they taking you, my good soul?” she said. “The child! what am

I to do with the child if it's not theirs?” she cried.

“What does she want, this woman?” asked the officer.

Pierre was like a drunken man. His excitement was increased at the sight of

the little girl he had saved.

“What does she want?” he said. “She is carrying my daughter, whom I have just

saved from the flames,” he declared. “Good-bye!” and utterly at a loss to

explain to himself the aimless lie he had just blurted out, he strode along with

a resolute and solemn step between the Frenchmen.

The patrol of Uhlans was one of those that had been sent out by Durosnel's

orders through various streets of Moscow to put a stop to pillage, and still

more to capture the incendiaries, who in the general opinion of the French

officers in the higher ranks on that day were causing the fires. Patrolling

several streets, the Uhlans arrested five more suspicious characters, a

shopkeeper, two divinity students, a peasant, and a house-serf—all

Russians—besides several French soldiers engaged in pillage. But of all these

suspicious characters Pierre seemed to them the most suspicious of all.

When they had all been brought for the night to a big house on Zubovsky

rampart, which had been fixed upon as a guardhouse, Pierre was put apart from

the rest under strict guard.

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