On the third of September Pierre awoke late, his head aching, his clothes uncomfortable from sleep without undressing, and his mind dimly conscious of something shameful: yesterday's conversation with Captain Ramballe. It was eleven, and peculiarly dark outdoors. He saw the pistol Gerasim had replaced on the writing table and remembered what lay before him that day. He would not let himself reflect. He dressed, took the pistol, then realised he could not carry so large a weapon unnoticed through the streets, and that it had been discharged and not reloaded. The dagger would do, though he had often thought the German student's chief mistake in 1809 was to try a dagger. His chief aim now was less the deed than proving to himself that he would not abandon it. He hid the blunt jagged dagger from the Sukharev market under his waistcoat, pulled his cap low, and slipped out, trying not to meet the captain.
The fire he had watched so indifferently the evening before had greatly increased. Carriage Row, the Bazaar, the Povarskoy, barges on the river, and timber yards by the Dorogomilov Bridge were ablaze. The air was smoke. Russians with anxious faces and Frenchmen with a camp air looked at Pierre in surprise: the Russians because they could not place his class, the French because he paid them no attention. He shook his head when asked if he knew French, and only understood a sentinel's shout when the musket clicked. He carried his resolution like something dreadful and alien, afraid of losing it after last night. He did not know that Napoleon had already passed the Arbat hours earlier and was sitting gloomily in a Kremlin study, giving orders to extinguish the fire, stop looting, and reassure the inhabitants.
On a footpath by Prince Gruzinski's gardens he heard a woman weeping. Household goods lay on the dusty grass. A thin woman in a black cloak, Mary Nikolaevna, sobbed that her youngest daughter Katie had been left behind and burned. Her husband moved trunks with an expressionless face. Pierre asked where the child was. The dirty maid Aniska led him. At the sight of the fire he felt suddenly young, bright, and resolute, freed from the ideas that had weighed him down. French soldiers stopped him in the street, then he reached a small wooden wing burning fiercely. Looters were dragging things from the large house. A Frenchman at a window said he had heard something squealing in the garden. A black-eyed soldier with a spot on his cheek jumped down, ran with Pierre, and pointed to a three-year-old girl in a pink dress lying under a seat. Pierre seized her; she screamed, struggled, and tried to bite. Horror and repulsion rose in him, as if he had touched a nasty little animal, but he pressed the sobbing child to himself and ran through the garden seeking another way out.
Coming Up in Chapter 263
Having run through different yards and side streets, Pierre gets back with his little burden to the Gruzinski garden at the corner of the Povarskoy. He does not at first recognize the place, so crowded is it now with people and goods dragged out of the houses, and with French soldiers in a variety of clothing.
