War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy [226]
The postmaster came in and humbly began asking his excellency to wait only two little hours, after which (come what might) he would give his excellency post-horses. The postmaster was obviously lying and only wanted to get extra money from the traveler. “Is that bad, or is it good?” Pierre asked himself. “For me it’s good, for some other traveler it would be bad, and for the postmaster it’s inevitable, because he has nothing to eat: he says an officer gave him a thrashing on account of that. The officer gave him a thrashing because he had to leave soon. And I shot at Dolokhov because I considered myself insulted. And Louis XVI was executed because he was considered a criminal, and a year later those who executed him were also killed for something. What is bad? What is good? What should one love, what hate? Why live, and what am I? What is life, what is death? What power rules over everything?” he asked himself. And there was no answer to any of these questions except one, which was not logical and was not at all an answer to these questions. This answer was: “You will die—and everything will end. You will die and learn everything—or stop asking.” But to die was also frightening.
The Torzhok peddler woman offered him her wares in a shrill voice, especially a pair of goatskin shoes. “I have hundreds of roubles that I don’t know what to do with, and she stands there in a tattered coat and looks at me timidly,” thought Pierre. “And what does she need the money for? As if this money can add one hair’s breadth to her happiness, her peace of mind? Can anything in the world make her or me less subject to evil and death? Death, which will end everything and which must come today or tomorrow—in a moment, anyhow, compared with eternity.” And he again put pressure on the stripped screw, and the screw kept turning in one and the same place.
His servant handed him a book cut as far as the middle, an epistolary novel by Mme Souza.1 He started reading about the sufferings and virtuous struggle of some Amélie de Mansfield. “And why did she struggle against her seducer,” he wondered, “if she loved him? God could not have put into her soul a yearning that was contrary to His will. My former wife didn’t struggle, and maybe she was right. Nothing has been discovered,” Pierre again said to himself, “nothing has been invented. We can know only that we know nothing. And that is the highest degree of human wisdom.”
Everything within him and around him seemed confused, senseless, and loathsome. But in this very loathing for everything around him, Pierre took a sort of irritating pleasure.
“May I be so bold as to ask Your Excellency to move over a little for this gentleman?” asked the postmaster, coming into the room and bringing in another traveler who was detained for lack of horses. This was a squat, large-boned, sallow, wrinkled old man with gray, beetling brows over glittering eyes of an indefinite grayish color.
Pierre took his feet off the table, got up, and lay down on the bed prepared for him, glancing from time to time at the man who had come in and, not looking at Pierre, with a sullenly weary air, was undressing with difficulty, helped by a servant. Left in a fleece-lined nankeen coat, with felt boots on his skinny, bony legs, the traveler sat down on the sofa, leaned his close-cropped head, very big and broad at the temples, against the back, and looked at Bezukhov. The stern, intelligent, and penetrating expression of this look struck Pierre. He wanted to start a conversation with this traveler, but, as he was preparing to address him with a question about the road, the traveler closed his eyes and, folding his wrinkled old man’s hands, on the finger of one of which was a big cast-iron signet ring with a death’s head, sat motionless, either resting or, as it seemed to Pierre, reflecting deeply and calmly on something. The traveler’s servant was also a sallow old man, all covered with wrinkles, with no beard or mustache, which evidently had not been shaved, but had never grown. The agile old servant opened the cellaret, prepared