War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy [760]
“What are you doing here?”
“Why? Let him be,” said Pierre, taking Nikolai by the arm, and he went on: “That’s not enough, I told them: something else is needed now. When you stand and wait for that tightened string to snap any moment, when everybody’s waiting for the inevitable upheaval—people must join hands, as many and as closely as possible, in order to oppose the general catastrophe. Everything young and strong is drawn there and gets corrupted. One is seduced by women, another by honors, a third by vainglory or money—and they go over to the other camp. There are no independent people like you and me left. I say: expand the circle of the society; let the mot d’ordre*753 be not only virtue, but independence and activity.”
Nikolai, having let his nephew be, angrily moved up his armchair, sat down in it, and, as he listened to Pierre, coughed discontentedly and frowned more and more.
“But what’s the purpose of your activity?” he cried. “And in what relation will you stand to the government?”
“Here’s in what! In the relation of helpers. The society may not be secret, if the government allows it. Not only is it not hostile to the government, but it is a society of true conservatives. A society of gentlemen in the full sense of the word. It’s only so as not to have Pugachev come tomorrow and put a knife into my and your children, or to have Arakcheev send me to a military settlement—we’re joining hands only for that, with the one purpose of the common good and common security.”
“Yes, but a secret society—consequently a hostile and harmful one, which can breed only evil,” said Nikolai, raising his voice.
“Why so? Did the Tugendbund,11 which saved Europe” (they still did not dare to think then that Russia had saved Europe), “breed anything harmful? The Tugendbund is an alliance of virtue, it is love, mutual aid; it’s what Christ preached on the Cross…”
Natasha, who had come into the room in the middle of the conversation, looked joyfully at her husband. She did not rejoice in what he was saying. She was not even interested in it, because it seemed to her that it was all extremely simple and that she had long known it (it seemed so, because she knew where it all came from—the whole soul of Pierre). But she rejoiced looking at his animated, rapturous figure.
With still more joyful rapture, Pierre was looked at by the boy they had all forgotten, with his thin neck emerging from a turned-down collar. Every word of Pierre’s burned his heart, and with a nervous movement of the fingers—not noticing it himself—he kept breaking the pens and sticks of sealing wax that lay on his uncle’s table.
“What I’m proposing is not at all what you think, but something like what the German Tugendbund was.”
“Well, brother, the Tugendbund is fine for sausage makers. I don’t understand it and can’t even pronounce it,” the loud, resolute voice of Denisov rang out. “Everything’s nasty and vile, I aree, only this Tugendbund I don’t understand, but if you don’t like things—rebellion, that’s the way! Je suis votre homme!”*754
Pierre smiled, Natasha laughed, but Nikolai knitted his brows still more and began demonstrating to Pierre that no sort of upheaval was expected and that all the danger he was speaking of existed only in his imagination. Pierre demonstrated the contrary, and as his mental powers were stronger and more resourceful, Nikolai felt himself up against the wall. This made him still angrier, since in his heart, not by reasoning, but by something stronger than reasoning, he knew the unquestionable rightness of his opinion.
“Here’s what I’ll tell you,” he said, getting up and trying to prop his pipe in the corner with a nervous gesture and finally abandoning it. “I can’t prove anything to you. You say everything’s bad with us and there’ll be an upheaval; I don’t see that; but you say an oath is a conventional thing, and to that I’ll tell you: you’re my best friend, you know that, but if you were to set up a secret society and start opposing the government, whatever it might be, I know that my duty