War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy [230]
The Mason was silent for a long time, evidently thinking something over.
“Help is given only by God,” he said, “but that measure of help which our order has in its power to give you, it will give you, my dear sir. You are going to Petersburg. Give this to Count Willarski” (he took out his pocketbook and wrote a few words on a large sheet of paper folded in four). “Allow me to give you one piece of advice. When you arrive in the capital, devote the initial time to solitude, to examining yourself, and do not set out on the former ways of life. With that I wish you a good journey, my dear sir,” he said, noticing that his servant had come into the room, “and success…”
The traveler was Osip Alexeevich Bazdeev, as Pierre learned from the postmaster’s register. Bazdeev had been one of the best-known Masons and Martinists even back in Novikov’s time.4 Long after his departure, Pierre, neither going to bed nor asking for horses, paced the station-house room, thinking over his depraved past and, with a rapture of renewal, picturing to himself his blissful, irreproachable, and virtuous future, which seemed so easy to him. He had been depraved, it seemed to him, only because he had somehow accidentally forgotten how good it was to be virtuous. In his soul there remained no trace of his former doubts. He firmly believed in the possibility of the brotherhood of people, united with the purpose of supporting each other on the path of virtue, and that was what he imagined Masonry to be.
III
On arriving in Petersburg, Pierre did not inform anyone of his arrival, did not go out anywhere, and started spending whole days reading Thomas à Kempis,5 a book which some unknown person had delivered to him. Pierre understood one thing and one thing only while reading this book; he understood the delight, previously unknown to him, of the possibility of achieving perfection and the possibility of brotherly and active love among people, which Osip Alexeevich had revealed to him. A week after his arrival, the young Polish count Willarski, whom Pierre knew superficially in Petersburg society, came into his room in the evening with that official and solemn look with which Dolokhov’s second had come to him, and, closing the door behind him and making sure that there was no one in the room except Pierre, addressed him.
“I have come to you with a suggestion and a message, Count,” he said, without sitting down. “A person very highly placed in our brotherhood has solicited for you to be received into the brotherhood before the fixed term, and has suggested that I be your sponsor. I consider it my sacred duty to fulfill the will of this person. Do you wish, under my sponsorship, to enter the brotherhood of Freemasons?”
The cold and severe tone of this man whom he had almost always seen at balls with an amiable smile, in the society of the most brilliant women, struck Pierre.
“Yes, I do,” he said.
Willarski inclined his head.
“One more question, Count,” he said, “which I ask you to answer not as a future Mason, but as an honest man (galant homme), in all sincerity: have you renounced your former convictions, do you believe in God?”
Pierre reflected.
“Yes…yes, I believe in God,” he said.
“In that case…” Willarski began, but Pierre interrupted him.
“Yes, I believe in God,” he said once more.
“In that case we can go,” said Willarski. “My carriage is at your service.”
Willarski was silent the whole way. To Pierre’s question of what he must do and how to answer, Willarski said only that brothers more worthy than he would test him and that Pierre need do nothing more than tell the truth.
Having driven through the gates of a big house where the lodge was quartered and gone up a dark stairway, they went into a small, well-lit anteroom, where they took off their fur coats without the help of servants. From the anteroom they went into another room. Some man in strange attire appeared at the door. Willarski, going to meet him, said something to him quietly in French and went over to a small wardrobe, in which Pierre noticed