War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy [690]
XIII
At noon on the twenty-second, Pierre was going up a hill on a muddy, slippery road, looking at his feet and the unevenness of the way. Now and then he glanced at the familiar crowd around him, then again at his feet. Both were equally his own and familiar to him. The bowlegged purplish Gray ran merrily along the side of the road, cocking its hind leg and hopping on three, to prove its agility and satisfaction, then dashing along again on all four, barking at the crows that sat on the carrion. Gray was sleeker and merrier than in Moscow. On all sides lay the flesh of various animals, from men to horses, in various stages of decay. The walking men kept the wolves from coming near, so that Gray could eat as much as he liked.
It had been raining all morning, and had seemed as if it were just about to stop and the sky to clear, when, after a short pause, the rain would come down harder still. The rain-soaked road no longer absorbed water, and streams flowed down the ruts.
Pierre walked along looking on all sides, counting his steps by threes, and bending his fingers. Addressing the rain, he was inwardly saying to it: “Well, well, go on, give us some more.”
It seemed to him that he was not thinking of anything; but somewhere far and deep his soul was thinking something important and comforting. That something was the subtlest spiritual extract from his conversation the day before with Karataev.
The day before, at their nightly halt, having grown cold by a dead campfire, Pierre had gotten up and gone over to the nearest better-burning fire. By the fire he went to sat Platon, his greatcoat covering his head like a priest’s vestment, telling the soldiers, in his quick, pleasant, but weak, sickly voice, a story Pierre knew.6 It was already past midnight. This was the time when Karataev usually recovered from his bouts of fever and was especially animated. Coming up to the fire and hearing Platon’s weak, sickly voice and seeing his pitiful face brightly lit by the fire, Pierre felt something stab his heart unpleasantly. He was afraid of his pity for this man and wanted to go away, but there was no other fire, and so, trying not to look at Platon, Pierre sat down by the fire.
“So, how’s your health?” he asked.
“My health? Lament for your sickness, and God won’t grant you death,” said Karataev, and he went back at once to the story he had begun.
“…And so, brother mine,” Platon continued, with a smile on his thin, pale face, and with a special, joyful brightness in his eyes, “so, brother mine…”
Pierre had long known this story. Karataev had told it to him alone some six times, and always with a special, joyful feeling. But however well Pierre knew this story, he now listened to it as something new, and the quiet rapture that Karataev clearly felt as he told it communicated itself to Pierre. It was a story about an old merchant, who lived a seemly and God-fearing life with his family, and went once with a comrade, a rich merchant, to the Makary.7
Having stopped at an inn, the two merchants went to bed, and the next day the comrade was found murdered and robbed. The bloody knife was found under the old merchant’s pillow. The merchant was tried, punished with the knout, and, having had his nostrils slit, was—in due order, as Karataev said—sent to hard labor.
“And so, brother mine” (Pierre arrived at this point in Karataev’s story), “ten years or more go by after this affair. The old man lives at hard labor. Duly submits, does nothing bad. Only asks God for death. Good. And the convicts got together, a nightly thing, like you and me here, and the old man was with