War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy [603]
The fire, which he had looked at so indifferently the evening before, had grown significantly overnight. Now Moscow was burning on different sides. Carriage Row, Zamoskvorechye, the Shopping Arcade, Povarskaya Street, the barges on the Moskva River, and the firewood market by the Dorogomilovo bridge were burning at the same time.
Pierre’s path lay through back lanes to Povarskaya and from there to the Arbat, to St. Nicholas the Revealed, which had long been designated in his imagination as the place where his deed was to be accomplished. Most of the houses had their gates and shutters closed. The streets and lanes were deserted. There was a smell of smoke and burning in the air. Now and then he met Russians with anxiously timid faces and Frenchmen with a non-city, camplike look walking down the middle of the streets. Both looked at Pierre with astonishment. Besides his great height and fatness, besides the strange, gloomily concentrated and suffering expression of his face and his whole figure, the Russians studied Pierre with interest, because they could not figure out what estate this man might belong to. The French followed him with astonished eyes particularly because, unlike all other Russians, who looked at the French with fear or curiosity, Pierre paid no attention to them. By the gates of one house, three Frenchmen, explaining something to some Russians who did not understand them, stopped Pierre to ask if he knew French.
Pierre shook his head negatively and went on. In another lane, a sentry standing by a green box called out to him, and only after the repetition of the threatening cry and the sound of the sentry cocking his musket did Pierre understand that he should go over to the other side of the street. He heard and saw nothing around him. With haste and horror, he carried his intention inside him like something dreadful and alien, afraid—having been taught by the previous night’s experience—of somehow losing it. But Pierre was not destined to bring his state of mind intact to the place he was heading for. Besides, even if nothing held him up on his way, his intention could no longer be carried out, because more than four hours ago Napoleon had ridden from the suburb of Dorogomilovo down the Arbat to the Kremlin, and, in the darkest mood, was now sitting in the tsar’s office in the Kremlin palace, issuing detailed, thorough instructions about the measures to be taken immediately to put out the fires, prevent looting, and reassure the inhabitants. But Pierre did not know that; entirely absorbed by what lay before him, he suffered, as people suffer who stubbornly undertake something impossible—not because of its difficulty, but because of its unsuitability to their nature; he suffered from fear that he would weaken at the decisive moment and, as a result, would lose repect for himself.
Though he saw and heard nothing around him, he found his way by instinct and without mistake took the lanes that led him to Povarskaya.
As Pierre approached Povarskaya, the smoke became thicker and thicker, and it even became warm from the flames of the fire. Fiery tongues occasionally soared up from behind the roofs of the houses. There were more people in the streets, and those people were more alarmed. But, though he felt that something extraordinary was happening around him, he was not aware that he was approaching the fire. Walking down a path that led across a big vacant lot adjoining Povarskaya on one side and the gardens of Prince Gruzinsky’s house on the other, Pierre suddenly heard a woman’s desperate cry just next to him. He stopped as if awakening from sleep and raised his head.
By the side of the path, on the dry, dusty grass, lay a heap of household belongings: featherbeds, a samovar, icons, and trunks. On the ground by the trunks sat a thin, middle-aged woman, with long, protruding front teeth, dressed in a black coat and bonnet. This woman, rocking and muttering something, was weeping heartrendingly. Two