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Pierre, girt with a rope round his waist and wearing shoes Karataev had made for him from some leather a French soldier had torn off a tea chest and brought to have his boots mended with, went up to the sick man and squatted down beside him. "You know, Sokolov, they are not all going away! They have a hospital here. You may be better off than we others," said Pierre. "O Lord!
The Frenchman looked at the linen, considered for a moment, then looked inquiringly at Pierre and, as if Pierre's look had told him something, suddenly blushed and shouted in a squeaky voice: "Platoche! Eh, Platoche! Keep them yourself!" And handing back the odd bits he turned and went out. "There, look at that," said Karataev, swaying his head.
"How simple and clear it is," thought Pierre. "How is it I did not know it before?" "God is in the midst, and each drop tries to expand so as to reflect Him to the greatest extent. And it grows, merges, disappears from the surface, sinks to the depths, and again emerges. There now, Karataev has spread out and disappeared. Do you understand, my child?" said the teacher.
Harder and more blessed than all else is to love this life in one's sufferings, in innocent sufferings." "Karataev!" came to Pierre's mind. And suddenly he saw vividly before him a long-forgotten, kindly old man who had given him geography lessons in Switzerland. "Wait a bit," said the old man, and showed Pierre a globe. This globe was alive a vibrating ball without fixed dimensions.
Suddenly and simultaneously a crowd of memories awoke in his fancy of the look Platon had given him as he sat under the tree, of the shot heard from that spot, of the dog's howl, of the guilty faces of the two Frenchmen as they ran past him, of the lowered and smoking gun, and of Karataev's absence at this halt and he was on the point of realizing that Karataev had been killed, but just at that instant, he knew not why, the recollection came to his mind of a summer evening he had spent with a beautiful Polish lady on the veranda of his house in Kiev.
It seemed to him that he was thinking of nothing, but far down and deep within him his soul was occupied with something important and comforting. This something was a most subtle spiritual deduction from a conversation with Karataev the day before. At their yesterday's halting place, feeling chilly by a dying campfire, Pierre had got up and gone to the next one, which was burning better.
Behind him, where Karataev had been sitting, the dog began to howl. "What a stupid beast! Why is it howling?" thought Pierre. His comrades, the prisoner soldiers walking beside him, avoided looking back at the place where the shot had been fired and the dog was howling, just as Pierre did, but there was a set look on all their faces.
They called him "little falcon" or "Platosha," chaffed him good-naturedly, and sent him on errands. But to Pierre he always remained what he had seemed that first night: an unfathomable, rounded, eternal personification of the spirit of simplicity and truth. Platon Karataev knew nothing by heart except his prayers. When he began to speak he seemed not to know how he would conclude.
"People said they were not Christians, but they too have souls. It's what the old folk used to say: 'A sweating hand's an open hand, a dry hand's close. He's naked, but yet he's given it back." Karataev smiled thoughtfully and was silent awhile looking at the pieces. "But they'll make grand leg bands, dear friend," he said, and went back into the shed.
He recalled Karataev and his death and involuntarily began to compare these two men, so different, and yet so similar in that they had both lived and both died and in the love he felt for both of them. Pierre drove up to the house of the old prince in a most serious mood. The house had escaped the fire; it showed signs of damage but its general aspect was unchanged.
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