War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy [318]
Often, listening to the stories of the women wanderers, she would become excited by their simple talk, mechanical for them, but full of deep meaning for her, so that several times she had been ready to drop everything and flee the house. In her imagination, she already saw herself and Fedosyushka in coarse rags, walking with a stick and a bag down a dusty road, guiding her wandering without envy, without love of human things, without desires, from one holy place to another, and in the end to the place where there is no sorrow or sighing, but eternal joy and bliss.25
“I’ll come to one place and pray; before I have time to get used to it and love it, I’ll go on. And I’ll keep going until my legs give out, and I lie down and die somewhere, and come finally to that eternal, quiet haven, where there is no sorrow or sighing!…” thought Princess Marya.
But then, seeing her father and especially little Coco, her intention would weaken, she would weep in quiet and feel she was a sinful woman: she loved her father and her nephew more than God.
Part Four
I
Biblical tradition says that absence of work—idleness—was the condition of the first man’s blessedness before his fall. The love of idleness remained the same in fallen man, but the curse still weighs on man, and not only because we must win our bread in the sweat of our face,1 but because our moral qualities are such that we are unable to be idle and at peace. A secret voice tells us that we should feel guilty for being idle. If man could find a condition in which, while idle, he felt that he was being useful and was fulfilling his duty, he would have found one side of primordial blessedness. And this state of obligatory and irreproachable idleness is enjoyed by an entire class—the military. In this obligatory and irreproachable idleness consists and will consist the chief attraction of military service.
Nikolai Rostov experienced this blessedness to the full as he continued serving after 1807 in the Pavlogradsky regiment, where he was already a squadron commander, having taken over from Denisov.
Rostov had become a bluff, good-natured fellow, whom his Moscow acquaintances would have found slightly mauvais genre,*354 but who was loved and respected by his comrades, subordinates, and superiors, and who was content with his life. Lately—that is, in 1809—in letters from home, he often found complaints from his mother that their affairs were falling into worse and worse disorder, and that it was time for him to come home, to bring joy and peace to his old parents.
Reading these letters, Nikolai experienced a fear that they wanted to make him leave the milieu in which he lived calmly and peacefully, protected from life’s confusion. He felt that sooner or later he would have to enter the deep water of life again, with its affairs disordered and straightened out, with its stewards’ accounts, with its quarrels, intrigues, connections, with its society, with Sonya’s love and his promise to her. All this was terribly difficult, confused, and he answered his mother’s letters with cold, classical ones that began “Ma chère maman” and ended “votre obéissant fils,”†355 and omitted saying when he intended to return. In 1810 he received letters from his parents in which they informed him of Natasha’s engagement to Bolkonsky and that the wedding would take place in a year, because the old prince was against it. This letter upset and insulted Nikolai. First of all, he felt sorry that Natasha, whom he loved most of all in the family, would be leaving home; second, from his hussar point of view, he was sorry he was not there to show this Bolkonsky that connection with him was by no means so great an