War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy [606]
XXXIV
When Pierre, having run around through courtyards and lanes, got back with his burden to the Gruzinskys’ garden at the corner of Povarskaya, he did not at first recognize the place from which he had gone to look for the child, it was so cluttered with people and belongings taken from the house. Besides Russian families with their chattels, escaped from the fire, there were also several French soldiers in various dress. Pierre paid no attention to them. He was in a hurry to find the official’s family, so as to give the daughter to the mother and go again to save someone. It seemed to Pierre that he had to do much more of something and do it quickly. Flushed from the heat and the running, Pierre at that moment experienced even more strongly than before that feeling of youth, animation, and determination which had taken hold of him as he was running to save the child. The girl had quieted down now and, holding on to Pierre’s kaftan with her little hands, sat on his arm and looked around like a wild animal. Pierre occasionally glanced at her and smiled slightly. It seemed to him that he saw something touchingly innocent and angelic in that frightened and sickly little face.
Neither the official nor his wife were in the former place now. Pierre strode quickly among the people, looking at various faces he came upon. He involuntarily noticed a Georgian or Armenian family, which consisted of a very old, handsome man with a face of the Oriental type, dressed in a new fur-lined coat and new boots, an old woman of the same type, and a young woman. This very young woman seemed to Pierre the perfection of Oriental beauty, with her sharply outlined, arched eyebrows and long face, of an extraordinarily delicate pink, beautiful and expressionless. Among the scattered belongings, in the crowd on the square, she, in her costly satin-covered winter coat and bright purple shawl, which covered her head, resembled a tender hothouse flower thrown out on the snow. She sat on some bundles slightly behind the old woman, and her big, dark, elongated eyes, with their long lashes, looked motionlessly at the ground. She clearly knew her own beauty and feared for it. Her face struck Pierre, and, hastening along the fence, he turned several times to look at her. On reaching the fence and still not finding those he wanted, Pierre stood looking around.
The figure of Pierre with the child in his arms was now even more noticeable than before, and several Russian men and women gathered around him.
“Have you lost someone, dear man? You’re a gentleman yourself, aren’t you? Whose child is it?” he was asked.
Pierre replied that the child belonged to a woman in a black coat who had been sitting in that place with her children, and asked if anyone knew her and where she had gone.
“That must be the Anferovs,” said an old deacon, addressing a pockmarked woman. “Lord have mercy, Lord have mercy,” he added in an accustomed bass.
“What Anferovs!” said the old woman. “The Anferovs left in the morning. It must be either Marya Nikolavna or the Ivanovs.”
“He says it was a woman, but Marya Nikolavna is a lady,” said a servant.
“You must know her—long teeth, thin,” said Pierre.
“That’s Marya Nikolavna. They went to the garden when these wolves swooped down on us,” said the woman, pointing to the French soldiers.
“Oh, Lord have mercy,” the deacon added again.
“Go that way, they’re over there. It’s her. She kept grieving, weeping,” the woman said again. “It’s her. Over there.”
But Pierre was not listening to the woman. For several seconds now, not taking his eyes away, he had been watching what was going on a few steps from him. He had been watching the Armenian family and two French soldiers who had gone up to them. One of the soldiers, a fidgety little man, was wearing a dark blue greatcoat tied with a rope. There was a cap on his head; his feet were bare. The other, who especially struck Pierre, was a tall, stooping, thin, flaxen-haired man with sluggish movements and an idiotic expression on his face.