After his interview with his wife Pierre leaves for Petersburg. At the Torzhók post station, either there are no horses or the postmaster will not supply them. Pierre is obliged to wait. Without undressing he lies on the leather sofa in front of a round table, puts his big feet in their overboots on the table, and begins to reflect. Will the valet bring in the portmanteaus, get a bed ready, and tea? Pierre gives no answer; he neither hears nor sees. He has been thinking since the last station of a question so important that he takes no notice of what goes on. Compared with those thoughts it is a matter of indifference whether he remains a few hours or the rest of his life. The postmaster, his wife, the valet, and a peasant woman selling Torzhók embroidery come offering services. Without changing his careless attitude he looks at them over his spectacles, unable to understand what they want or how they can go on living without having solved the problems that absorb him. Ever since the sleepless night after Sokólniki the same thoughts have engrossed him; in the solitude of the journey they seize him with special force. Whatever he thinks about, he returns to questions he cannot solve and cannot cease to ask. It is as if the thread of the chief screw which held his life together were stripped, so that the screw cannot get in or out, but goes on turning uselessly in the same place.
The postmaster obsequiously begs his excellency to wait only two hours, when, come what might, he shall have the courier horses. It is plain he is lying and only wants more money. Is this good or bad? Good for Pierre, bad for another traveler, unavoidable for the man, who needs money for food; an officer once thrashed him for letting a private traveler have courier horses, because the officer had to get on. And Pierre shot Dólokhov because he considered himself injured, and Louis XVI was executed because they considered him a criminal, and a year later they executed those who executed him. What is bad? What is good? What should one love and what hate? What does one live for? What am I? What is life, and what is death? What power governs all? There is no answer except one, not logical and not a reply: you will die and all will end; you will die and know all, or cease asking. But dying is also dreadful. The peddler woman, in a whining voice, offers goatskin slippers. He has hundreds of rubles he does not know what to do with, and she stands in a tattered cloak looking timidly at him. Can that money add a hair's breadth to happiness? Can anything make her or him less a prey to evil and death, which ends all and must come today or tomorrow, an instant compared with eternity? Again he twists the stripped screw, and again it turns uselessly.
His servant hands him a half-cut novel in letters by Madame de Souza. He reads of Emilie de Mansfeld's virtuous struggles. Why did she resist her seducer when she loved him? God could not have put into her heart an impulse against His will. His wife, as she once was, did not struggle, and perhaps she was right. Nothing has been found out. All we can know is that we know nothing, and that is the height of human wisdom. Everything within and around him seems confused, senseless, and repellent, and in that very repugnance he finds a tantalizing satisfaction. The postmaster asks him to move a little for another traveler, also detained for lack of horses. The newcomer is a short, large-boned, yellow-faced, wrinkled old man, grey bushy eyebrows overhanging bright eyes of an indefinite greyish colour. Pierre takes his feet off the table, stands, and lies down on a bed got ready for him, glancing now and then at the stranger, who wearily takes off his wraps with a servant's aid and does not look at Pierre. In felt boots and a worn nankeen-covered sheepskin he sits, leans back his big head with broad temples and close-cropped hair, and looks at Bezúkhov. The stern, shrewd, penetrating expression strikes Pierre. He wishes to speak, but by the time he has made up his mind to ask about the roads, the traveler has closed his eyes. On a shriveled finger Pierre notices a large cast-iron ring with a seal representing a death's head. The servant, also yellow and wrinkled, without beard or mustache because they never grew, unpacks a canteen, brings a samovar, and is passed a tumbler of tea. When he returns the tumbler upside down with nibbled sugar, the stranger asks for the book, a work Pierre takes to be devotional, and becomes absorbed. All at once he closes it, putting in a marker, and sits as before with eyes shut. Pierre looks at him and has not time to turn away when the old man opens his eyes and fixes a steady, severe gaze straight on Pierre's face. Pierre feels confused and wishes to avoid that look, but the bright old eyes attract him irresistibly.
