War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy [253]
“Yes, that’s Herder’s teaching,”18 said Prince Andrei, “but that, dear heart, does not convince me; life and death are what convince me. What convinces me is to see a being dear to you, who is bound up with you, before whom you were guilty and hoped to vindicate yourself” (Prince Andrei’s voice quavered and he turned away), “and suddenly this being suffers, agonizes, and ceases to be…Why? It cannot be that there’s no answer! And I believe there is one…That is what convinces, that is what has convinced me,” said Prince Andrei.
“Yes, ah, yes,” said Pierre, “and isn’t that the same as what I’m saying?”
“No. All I say is that what convinces one of the necessity of a future life is not arguments, but when one goes through life hand in hand with a person, and suddenly that person disappears there into nowhere, and you yourself stop before that abyss and look into it. And I did look…”
“Well, that’s just it! You know there’s a there and there’s a someone? There is the future life. The someone is—God.”
Prince Andrei did not reply. The carriage and horses had long been led out on the other side and hitched up, and the sun had already half disappeared, and the evening frost had covered the pools by the crossing with stars, but Pierre and Andrei, to the astonishment of the lackeys, coachmen, and ferrymen, were still standing on the ferry and talking.
“If there is God and if there is a future life, then there is truth, there is virtue; and man’s highest happiness consists in striving to attain them. We must live, we must love, we must believe,” said Pierre, “that we do not live only today on this scrap of earth, but have lived and will live eternally there, in the all” (he pointed to the sky). Prince Andrei stood with his elbow resting on the rail of the ferry, and, listening to Pierre, did not take his eyes off the red gleam of the sun on the blue floodwaters. Pierre fell silent. It was completely still. The ferry had long been moored, and only the waves of the current lapped with a faint sound against the ferry’s bottom. It seemed to Prince Andrei that this splash of waves made a refrain to Pierre’s words, saying: “It’s true, believe it.”
Prince Andrei sighed, and with a luminous, childlike, tender gaze looked into the flushed, rapturous face of Pierre, who still felt timid before his superior friend.
“Yes, if only it were so!” he said. “Anyhow, let’s go and get in,” Prince Andrei added and, stepping off the ferry, he looked at the sky Pierre had pointed to, and for the first time since Austerlitz saw that high, eternal sky he had seen as he lay on the battlefield, and something long asleep, something that was best in him, suddenly awakened joyful and young in his soul. This feeling disappeared as soon as Prince Andrei re-entered the habitual conditions of life, but he knew that this feeling, which he did not know how to develop, lived in him. The meeting with Pierre marked an epoch for Prince Andrei, from which began what, while outwardly the same, was in his inner world a new life.
XIII
It was already dusk when Prince Andrei and Pierre drove up to the main entrance of the house at Bald Hills. As they were driving up, Prince Andrei, smiling, drew Pierre’s attention to the bustling that was going on by the back porch. A bent old woman with a bundle on her back and a short man dressed in black and with long hair, seeing the carriage drive up, went running back