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On his face, besides the look of joyful emotion it had worn yesterday while telling the tale of the merchant who suffered innocently, there was now an expression of quiet solemnity. Karataev looked at Pierre with his kindly round eyes now filled with tears, evidently wishing him to come near that he might say something to him. But Pierre was not sufficiently sure of himself.
Now you've curled up and got warm, you daughter of a bitch!" said Karataev, touching the dog that lay at his feet, and again turning over he fell asleep immediately. Sounds of crying and screaming came from somewhere in the distance outside, and flames were visible through the cracks of the shed, but inside it was quiet and dark.
What genuine feeling and affection rings in this sketch of Plato, a common soldier, in "War and Peace!" "Plato Karataev was about fifty, judging by the number of campaigns in which he had served; he could not have told his exact age himself, and when he laughed, as he often did, he showed two rows of strong, white teeth.
Pierre began to tell about Karataev, but paused. By this time he had risen from the table and was pacing the room, Natasha following him with her eyes. Then he added: "No, you can't understand what I learned from that illiterate man that simple fellow." "Yes, yes, go on!" said Natasha. "Where is he?" "They killed him almost before my eyes."
And now without thinking about it he had found that peace and inner harmony only through the horror of death, through privation, and through what he recognized in Karataev. Those dreadful moments he had lived through at the executions had as it were forever washed away from his imagination and memory the agitating thoughts and feelings that had formerly seemed so important.
Judging by what he had said there was no one he had respected so highly as Platon Karataev. "Do you know what I am thinking about?" she asked. "About Platon Karataev. Would he have approved of you now, do you think?" Pierre was not at all surprised at this question. He understood his wife's line of thought.
"It will fit better still when it sets to your body," said Karataev, still admiring his handiwork. "You'll be nice and comfortable...." "Thanks, thanks, old fellow.... But the bits left over?" said the Frenchman again and smiled. He took out an assignation ruble note and gave it to Karataev. "But give me the pieces that are over."
'Good-bye; come and see me if you can; I live in.... But next day, through unforeseen circumstances, I was obliged to leave Moscow, and I never saw Piotr Petrovitch Karataev again. I was sitting in a birchwood in autumn, about the middle of September. From early morning a fine rain had been falling, with intervals from time to time of warm sunshine; the weather was unsettled.
Karataev had told it to him alone some half-dozen times and always with a specially joyful emotion. But well as he knew it, Pierre now listened to that tale as to something new, and the quiet rapture Karataev evidently felt as he told it communicated itself also to Pierre.
Karataev had no attachments, friendships, or love, as Pierre understood them, but loved and lived affectionately with everything life brought him in contact with, particularly with man not any particular man, but those with whom he happened to be. And Pierre began to feel in the same way toward Karataev. To all the other prisoners Platon Karataev seemed a most ordinary soldier.
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