War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy [282]
VII
Some two years before then, in 1808, having returned to Petersburg from his trip to his estates, Pierre involuntarily became the head of the Petersburg Masons. He organized dinners and funerals for the lodges, recruited new members, saw to the uniting of various lodges and the acquiring of authentic charters. He donated his own money for the setting up of temples and made up, as far as he could, for the shortfall in the collection of alms, in which the majority of members were stingy and irregular. Almost alone, on his own means, he supported a poorhouse set up by the order in Petersburg.
His life meanwhile went on in the same way, with the same diversions and licentiousness. He liked to dine and drink well, and though he considered it immoral and humiliating, he could not refrain from the amusements of the bachelor companies he participated in.
In the daze of his activities and diversions, however, Pierre began to feel after a year that the ground of Masonry, on which he stood, was giving way all the more under his feet the more firmly he tried to stand on it. Along with that, he felt that the further the ground he stood on gave way under his feet, the more involuntarily he was bound to it. When he was starting out in Masonry, he experienced the feeling of a man who trustingly sets foot on the smooth surface of a swamp. Placing one foot on it, he sank. To verify fully the firmness of the ground on which he stood, he placed the other foot on it and sank still more, became stuck, and now involuntarily walked knee-deep through the swamp.
Iosif Alexeevich was not in Petersburg. (He had recently withdrawn from the activity of the Petersburg lodges and was living permanently in Moscow.) All the brothers, the members of the lodges, were people whom Pierre knew in life, and it was difficult for him to see in them only brothers in Freemasonry, and not Prince B., not Ivan Vassilievich D., whom he knew in life mainly as weak and insignificant people. Under the Masonic aprons and signs, he saw on them the uniforms and decorations they strove for in life. Often, collecting alms and counting up twenty or thirty roubles, written down as receipts and for the most part left owing, from ten members, half of whom were as rich as he was, Pierre remembered the Masonic vow in which each brother promised to give all his possessions to his neighbor, and doubts arose in his soul which he tried not to dwell on.
He divided all the brothers he knew into four categories. In the first category he included brothers who took no active part either in the affairs of the lodges or in the affairs of the people, but were taken up exclusively with the mysteries of the order’s science, with questions of the triple name of God or of the three basic elements of things—sulfur, mercury, and salt, or with the meaning of the square and all the figures on Solomon’s temple.10 Pierre respected this category of brother Masons, to which mainly the old brothers and Iosif Alexeevich himself belonged, in Pierre’s opinion, but he did not share their interests. His heart was not inclined to the mystical side of Masonry.
In the second category Pierre included himself and similar brothers, seeking, vacillating, who had not yet found in Masonry a straight and clear path, but hoped to find one.
In the third category he included the brothers (they were the majority) who saw nothing in Masonry except external form and ritual, and who valued the strict observance of this external form, with no concern for its content and meaning. Such were Willarski and even the grand master of the main lodge.
In the fourth category, finally, there were also a great many brothers, especially those who had entered the brotherhood recently. These were people who, from Pierre’s observation, did not believe in anything, did not desire anything, and joined the Masons only to be close to the rich young brothers, powerful through their