In the evening Andrew and Pierre get into an open carriage for Bald Hills. Andrew, in good temper, points to fields and talks of husbandry. Pierre answers in monosyllables, gloomily sure that Andrew is unhappy and has gone astray, yet afraid that one word from him would upset the teaching Pierre holds sacred. Suddenly he lowers his head like a bull about to charge and insists Andrew should not think so about life and destiny. What saved Pierre, he says, was Freemasonry: not a ceremonial sect but the best expression of the eternal aspects of humanity, Christianity freed from the bonds of State and Church, a teaching of equality, brotherhood, and love. Only the holy brotherhood has the real meaning of life; outside it all is deceit. Join, be guided, and you will feel yourself a part of that vast invisible chain whose beginning is hidden in heaven. Andrew looks straight ahead, listens in silence, and more than once, when wheel noise swallows a line, asks Pierre to repeat it. A peculiar glow in Andrew's eyes tells Pierre the words are not in vain and that he will not be laughed at.
They reach a river that has overflowed its banks and must be crossed by ferry. While carriage and horses are placed on the raft, they step on too. Andrew leans on the railing and watches flooding water glitter in the setting sun. Asked what he thinks, he says he is listening. It is all very well to be shown the aim of life, but who are we? Men. Why does Pierre see a reign of goodness and truth on earth when Andrew does not? Pierre, taking a repeated "future life" for denial, will not wait. On this earth, he says, pointing to the fields, there is no truth; in the whole universe there is a kingdom of truth. He feels himself a link between lower and higher beings, a step on a ladder that does not break off at man. Nothing vanishes; he has always existed and always will. Andrew names Herder, then says life and death convince, not syllogism. His voice trembles: a being dear to him, before whom he was to blame and hoped to make it right, is seized with pain, suffers, and ceases to exist. Why? There must be an answer. Argument does not convince him of a future life; walking hand in hand with someone who vanishes into nowhere, leaving you facing the abyss, does. He has looked in.
Pierre answers that there is a there and a Someone: God. The carriage has long been reharnessed on the farther bank. An evening frost stars the puddles. Footmen, coachmen, and ferrymen watch the two men still talking on the stopped raft. Pierre says if there is a God and a future life there is truth and good, and man's highest happiness is striving to attain them. We must live, love, and believe we have lived and shall live forever in the Whole, and he points to the sky. Waves beat softly; Andrew feels them whisper that it is true, believe it. He glances with a radiant, childlike look at Pierre's flushed, shy face. Yes, if it only were so. Then it is time to get on. Stepping off, he looks up and, for the first time since Austerlitz, sees that high everlasting sky. Something long slumbering, the best in him, wakes joyful and youthful, then vanishes as soon as customary life returns. He does not know how to develop the feeling, but he knows it exists. The meeting forms an epoch: outwardly he lives the old way; inwardly he begins a new life.
