War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy [630]
From the moment when Pierre saw this horrible murder performed by people who did not want to do it, it was as if the spring that upheld everything and made it seem alive had been pulled from his soul, and it had all collapsed into a heap of meaningless trash. Though he did not account for it to himself, his faith in the world’s good order, in humanity’s and his own soul, and in God, was destroyed. Pierre had experienced this state before, but never with such force as now. Before, when doubts of this sort had come over Pierre, those doubts had had their source in his own guilt. And deep in his soul, Pierre had felt then that salvation from that despair and those doubts lay in himself. But now he felt that it was not his guilt that caused the world to collapse in front of his eyes and leave only meaningless ruins. He felt that to return to faith in life was not in his power.
People stood around him in the darkness: surely something in him interested them very much. They were telling him something, asking him about something, then they led him somewhere, and he finally found himself in a corner of the shed next to some people who were talking and laughing on all sides.
“And so, brothers…that same prince who…” the voice of someone in the opposite corner of the shed was saying, with special emphasis on the word “who.”
Sitting silently and motionlessly by the wall on some straw, Pierre now opened, now closed his eyes. But as soon as he closed his eyes, he saw before him the same frightful face of the factory worker, especially frightening in its simplicity, and the faces of his involuntary murderers, still more frightful in their anxiety. And he would open his eyes again and look senselessly into the darkness around him.
Next to him, bending over, sat some little man whose presence Pierre first noticed by the strong smell of sweat that came from him with his every movement. This man was doing something with his feet in the darkness, and though Pierre could not see his face, he felt that this man was constantly glancing at him. When his eyes got used to the darkness, Pierre realized that this man was taking off his footcloths. And the way he was doing it aroused Pierre’s interest.
Having untied the strips with which one foot was bound, he folded them neatly and at once began on the other foot, glancing up at Pierre. While one hand was hanging up the first strips, the other was already beginning to unwrap the other foot. In this accurate fashion, with rounded, deft movements that followed one another without pause, the man unwrapped his feet, hung the wrappings on pegs above his head, took out a pocket knife, cut something off, folded the knife, put it under his pillow, and, settling himself more comfortably, put his arms around his raised knees, and fixed his eyes directly on Pierre. Pierre felt something pleasant, soothing, and rounded in these deft movements, in this well-arranged domain of his in the corner, even in the smell of this man, and he looked at him without taking his eyes away.
“So you’ve seen a lot of misery, master? Eh?” the little man suddenly said. And in the man’s melodious voice there was such an expression of tenderness and simplicity that Pierre wanted to reply, but his jaw trembled, and he felt tears rising. The little man, in that same second, not giving Pierre time to show his confusion, spoke in the same pleasant voice.
“Ah, don’t grieve, little falcon,” he said with that tenderly melodious gentleness with which old Russian women speak. “Don’t grieve, little friend: you suffer an hour, you live an age! So it is, my dear. And we live here, thank God, with no offense. There’s bad people,