War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy [251]
“Why don’t you wash, it’s not clean,” said Prince Andrei. “On the contrary, one must try to make one’s life as pleasant as possible. I’m alive and it’s not my fault, which means I must somehow go on living the best I can, without bothering anybody, until I die.”
“But what makes you live? With such thoughts, you’ll sit without moving, without undertaking anything…”
“Life won’t leave one alone as it is. I’d be glad to do nothing, but then, on the one hand, the local nobility deemed me worthy of being elected their marshal;16 I barely got out of it. They couldn’t understand that I don’t have what it takes, don’t have the sort of good-natured and bustling banality needed for it. Then there’s this house, which had to be built so as to have a corner where I could be at peace. Now it’s the militia.”
“Why aren’t you serving in the army?”
“After Austerlitz!” Prince Andrei said gloomily. “No, I humbly thank you, I promised myself that I would not serve in the active Russian army. And I won’t. If Bonaparte was camped here in Smolensk, threatening Bald Hills, even then I wouldn’t serve in the Russian army. Well, as I was saying,” Prince Andrei went on, calming down. “Now it’s the militia, my father is commander in chief of the third district, and my only means of avoiding service is to be with him.”
“Which means you do serve?”
“I do.” He paused briefly.
“So why do you serve?”
“Here’s why. My father is one of the most remarkable men of his time. But he’s getting old, and it’s not that he’s cruel, but he has all too active a character. He’s frightening in his habit of unlimited power and now with this power bestowed on him by the sovereign as a commander in chief of the militia. If I had been two hours late a couple of weeks ago, he would have hanged a protocolist in Yukhnovo,” Prince Andrei said with a smile. “So I serve because no one except for me has any influence on my father, and at some point I may have to save him from an act from which he might suffer later.”
“Ah, well, so you see!”
“Yes, mais ce n’est pas comme vous l’entendez,”*316 Prince Andrei went on. “I never wished, nor do I wish now, any good to that scoundrel of a protocolist, who stole some boots from the militiamen; I’d even be very pleased to see him hanged, but I pity my father—that is, again, myself.”
Prince Andrei was becoming more and more animated. His eyes shone feverishly all the while he was trying to prove to Pierre that there never was any wish for his neighbor’s good in his action.
“Well, here you want to emancipate the peasants,” he went on. “That’s very good; but not for you (I suppose you’ve never whipped anyone to death or sent them to Siberia), and still less for the peasants. If they’re beaten, whipped, and sent to Siberia, I don’t think that makes it any worse for them. In Siberia he’ll go on with his brutish life, and the welts on his body will heal, and he’ll be as happy as he was before. But it’s needed for those people who are morally ruined, live to repent it, suppress this repentance, and turn coarse, because they have the possibility of punishing justly and unjustly. Those are the ones I pity and for whose sake I would wish for the emancipation of the peasants. Maybe you haven’t seen it, but I’ve seen good people brought up in this tradition of unlimited power, as they become more irritated over the years, become cruel, coarse, know it, can’t help themselves, and become more and more unhappy.”
Prince Andrei said this with such enthusiasm that it involuntarily occurred to Pierre that these thoughts had been suggested to Prince Andrei by his father. He made no reply.
“So there is what and whom to be sorry for—human dignity, peace of conscience, purity, and not their backs and heads, which, however much you whip them and shave them, will still remain the same backs and heads.