《War And Peace》Book11 CHAPTER XXXIV

《War And Peace》　Book11 　CHAPTER XXXIV
　　　　by 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.