War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy [231]
Having led him by the hand for some ten paces, Willarski stopped.
“Whatever happens to you,” he said, “you must courageously endure everything, if you are firmly resolved to enter our brotherhood.” (Pierre responded affirmatively by inclining his head.) “When you hear knocking on the door, you will unbind your eyes,” added Willarski. “I wish you courage and success.” And, pressing Pierre’s hand, Willarski went out.
Left alone, Pierre went on smiling in the same way. He shrugged his shoulders a couple of times, put his hand to the cloth as if wishing to take it off, and lowered it again. The five minutes he spent blindfolded seemed like an hour to him. His hands became swollen, his legs gave way under him; it seemed to him that he was tired. He experienced the most complex and varied feelings. He was afraid of what was going to happen to him, and still more afraid that he would show his fear. He was curious to know what he was about to go through, what would be revealed to him; but most of all he felt joy that the moment had come when he would finally enter the path of renewal and an actively virtuous life which he had been dreaming of since his meeting with Osip Alexeevich. There was loud knocking at the door. Pierre took off the blindfold and looked around. The room was pitch-dark: only in one place a lamp was burning inside something white. Pierre went closer and saw that the lamp was standing on a black table on which lay an open book. The book was the Gospel; the white thing in which the lamp was burning was a human skull with its holes and teeth. Having read the first words of the Gospel: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God,”6 Pierre went around the table and saw a large open box filled with something. This was a coffin with bones. He was not surprised in the least by what he saw. Hoping to enter a totally new life, totally different from his former one, he expected everything to be extraordinary, still more extraordinry than what he saw. A skull, a coffin, the Gospel—it seemed he had expected it all, had expected still more. Trying to call up a tender feeling in himself, he looked around. “God, death, love, the brotherhood of men,” he said to himself, connecting vague but joyful notions of something with these words. The door opened and someone came in.
By the faint light, to which Pierre’s eyes, however, had become accustomed, a short man came in. Evidently having come from light into darkness, the man stopped; then he moved with cautious steps towards the table and placed on it his small hands covered with leather gloves.
This short man was wearing a white leather apron that covered his chest and part of his legs, on his neck there was some sort of necklace, and behind the necklace rose a high white jabot, framing his elongated face, which was lit from below.
“Why have you come here?” asked the man, turning in the direction of Pierre, who had made a slight rustle. “Why have you, who do not believe in the truths of the light and do not see the light, why have you come here, what do you want from us? Wisdom, virtue, enlightenment?”
At the moment when the door opened and the unknown man came in, Pierre experienced a feeling of fear and awe similar to what he had experienced in childhood at confession; he felt himself alone with a man who was a total stranger in the circumstances of life, yet close in the brotherhood of men. With a pounding heart that took his breath away, Pierre moved towards the rhetor (so the masons call a brother who prepares a seeker to enter the brotherhood). Coming closer, Pierre recognized the rhetor