War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy [717]
XII
Pierre, as most often happens, felt the whole burden of the physical privations and strains he experienced during captivity only when those strains and privations were over. After being freed from captivity, he arrived in Orel, and on the third day after his arrival, as he was about to go to Kiev, he fell ill and spent three months lying ill in Orel; he had, as the doctors put it, “bilious fever.” Though the doctors treated him, let his blood, and gave him medications to drink, he nevertheless recovered.
All that happened to Pierre from the time he was set free until his illness left almost no impression on him. He remembered only gray, gloomy, now rainy, now snowy weather, inner physical anguish, pain in his legs, in his side; remembered the general impression of people’s misfortunes and sufferings; remembered the disturbing curiosity of officers and generals who asked him questions, his trouble finding a carriage and horses, and, above all, remembered his inability to think and feel at that time. On the day he was set free, he saw the corpse of Petya Rostov. On the same day, he learned that Prince Andrei had lived for over a month after the battle of Borodino and had died only recently in Yaroslavl, in the Rostovs’ house. And on the same day, Denisov, who told this news to Pierre, mentioned Hélène’s death, supposing that Pierre had already long known of it. All this only seemed strange then to Pierre. He felt that he could not understand the meaning of all this news. He only made haste then to get away quickly, quickly from those places where people were killing each other to some quiet haven, and there to recover, to rest, to rethink all these strange and new things that he learned during that time. But as soon as he arrived in Orel, he fell ill. On awakening from his illness, Pierre saw himself surrounded by his two servants from Moscow, Terenty and Vaska, and the eldest princess, who lived on Pierre’s estate in Yelets and, having learned of his liberation and illness, came to look after him.
During his convalescence, Pierre only gradually fell out of the habit of the impressions he had grown used to over the past months, and became used to the fact that no one was going to herd him anywhere tomorrow, that no one was going to take away his warm bed, and that he was certain to have dinner, and tea, and supper. But for a long time in his dreams he still saw himself in the old conditions of captivity. In the same way, Pierre gradually came to understand the news he had learned after being freed from captivity: the death of Prince Andrei, the death of his wife, and the annihilation of the French.
The joyful feeling of freedom—that full, inalienable freedom proper to a human being, the awareness of which he had experienced for the first time at the first halt after leaving Moscow—filled Pierre’s soul during his convalescence. He was astonished at how this inner freedom, independent of external circumstances, was now as if surrounded by the superfluity, the luxury of external freedom as well. He was alone in a strange town, without acquaintances. No one demanded anything of him; no one sent him anywhere. He had everything he wanted; the thought of his wife, which had eternally tormented him before, was no longer there, because she was no longer there.
“Ah, how good! How nice!” he said to himself, when they moved a laid table up to him with clean linen and fragrant broth, or when in the evening he lay down on the soft, clean bed, or when he remembered that his wife and the French were no more. “Ah, how good, how nice!” And by old habit he asked himself: “Well, and what then? What am I going to do?” And he answered himself at once: “Nothing. I’ll live. Ah, how nice!”
That which he had been tormented by before, which