Faith, Doubt, and Family Tensions — War and Peace

It is getting dusk when Andrew and Pierre drive up to Bald Hills. Andrew smiles at a commotion on the back porch: an aged woman with a wallet and a short, long-haired young man in black have rushed back to the gate, two women after them, all four running up the back steps in dismay. Those are Mary's God's folk, Andrew says; they have mistaken the carriage for his father. This is the one matter in which she disobeys him. He orders pilgrims driven away; she receives them. Pierre still does not know what God's folk are. Servants report the old prince has gone to town and is expected back any minute. Andrew leads Pierre to rooms always kept ready, looks into the nursery, then takes him to find Mary hiding with her guests. It will serve her right to be confused, he says; Pierre will see something curious.

Mary is disconcerted, red patches on her face, standing before her pilgrims like a hen before chickens in a snug room with lamps burning before the icon stand. A long-nosed lad in a monk's cassock sits by the samovar; a thin, shriveled old woman with a meek childlike face sits in an armchair. Mary greets Pierre in French, remembering him as a child, his friendship with Andrew, his misfortune with his wife, and his kindly face. Her radiant eyes seem to beg him not to laugh at her people. Andrew glances at Ivánushka and tells Pierre, despite Mary's imploring Au nom de Dieu, that this is a woman. The irony and Mary's helpless protection are their long-established relation. The pilgrims are not abashed. The old woman turns her cup upside down with a nibbled bit of sugar, hoping for more tea; Ivánushka sips from a saucer with sly womanish eyes. Pelagéya, back from Kiev and Kolyázin, tells of holy oil trickling from the Virgin's cheeks, of Crazy Cyril sending her, of a general who called monks cheats, went blind, and was healed when a star was fixed into the icon.

Pierre asks if she saw it herself, then says naïvely that it must be a fraud, that they impose on the people. Pelagéya, horrified, crosses herself and warns that God will punish him. Andrew smiles whether the Holy Mother was promoted to the rank of general. Pelagéya goes pale, then red, clasps her hands, remembers Andrew has a son, and begins to arrange her wallet, frightened and ashamed to have taken charity in a house where such things can be said, yet sorry to forgo it. Mary asks why they came to her. Pierre stammers that he was joking, that he did not wish to offend, that it was all his fault. His sincere penitence and Andrew's meek look, now at her and now at Pierre, gradually reassure Pelagéya. Faith stands against mockery, Mary's quiet rebellion against her father's orders, and Pierre's conscience waking faster than Andrew's wit.