The Forged Coupon | Page 5

himself, and
when he laughed, as he often did, he showed two rows of strong, white
teeth. There was not a grey hair on his head or in his beard, and his
bearing wore the stamp of activity, resolution, and above all, stoicism.
His face, though much lined, had a touching expression of simplicity,
youth, and innocence. When he spoke, in his soft sing-song voice, his
speech flowed as from a well-spring. He never thought about what he
had said or was going to say next, and the vivacity and the rhythmical
inflections of his voice gave it a penetrating persuasiveness. Night and
morning, when going to rest or getting up, he said, 'O God, let me sleep
like a stone and rise up like a loaf.' And, sure enough, he had no sooner
lain down than he slept like a lump of lead, and in the morning on
waking he was bright and lively, and ready for any work. He could do
anything, just not very well nor very ill; he cooked, sewed, planed
wood, cobbled his boots, and was always occupied with some job or
other, only allowing himself to chat and sing at night. He sang, not like
a singer who knows he has listeners, but as the birds sing to God, the
Father of all, feeling it as necessary as walking or stretching himself.
His singing was tender, sweet, plaintive, almost feminine, in keeping
with his serious countenance. When, after some weeks of captivity his
beard had grown again, he seemed to have got rid of all that was not his
true self, the borrowed face which his soldiering life had given him,
and to have become, as before, a peasant and a man of the people. In
the eyes of the other prisoners Plato was just a common soldier, whom
they chaffed at times and sent on all manner of errands; but to Pierre he
remained ever after the personification of simplicity and truth, such as
he had divined him to be since the first night spent by his side."
This clearly is a study from life, a leaf from Tolstoy's "Crimean
Journal." It harmonises with the point of view revealed in the "Letters
from Sebastopol" (especially in the second and third series), and shows,
like them, the change effected by the realities of war in the intolerant
young aristocrat, who previously excluded all but the comme-il-faut
from his consideration. With widened outlook and new ideals he

returned to St. Petersburg at the close of the Crimean campaign, to be
welcomed by the elite of letters and courted by society. A few years
before he would have been delighted with such a reception. Now it
jarred on his awakened sense of the tragedy of existence. He found
himself entirely out of sympathy with the group of literary men who
gathered round him, with Turgenev at their head. In Tolstoy's eyes they
were false, paltry, and immoral, and he was at no pains to disguise his
opinions. Dissension, leading to violent scenes, soon broke out between
Turgenev and Tolstoy; and the latter, completely disillusioned both in
regard to his great contemporary and to the literary world of St.
Petersburg, shook off the dust of the capital, and, after resigning his
commission in the army, went abroad on a tour through Germany,
Switzerland, and France.
In France his growing aversion from capital punishment became
intensified by his witnessing a public execution, and the painful
thoughts aroused by the scene of the guillotine haunted his sensitive
spirit for long. He left France for Switzerland, and there, among
beautiful natural surroundings, and in the society of friends, he enjoyed
a respite from mental strain.
"A fresh, sweet-scented flower seemed to have blossomed in my spirit;
to the weariness and indifference to all things which before possessed
me had succeeded, without apparent transition, a thirst for love, a
confident hope, an inexplicable joy to feel myself alive."
Those halcyon days ushered in the dawn of an intimate friendship
between himself and a lady who in the correspondence which ensued
usually styled herself his aunt, but was in fact a second cousin. This
lady, the Countess Alexandra A. Tolstoy, a Maid of Honour of the
Bedchamber, moved exclusively in Court circles. She was intelligent
and sympathetic, but strictly orthodox and mondaine, so that, while
Tolstoy's view of life gradually shifted from that of an aristocrat to that
of a social reformer, her own remained unaltered; with the result that at
the end of some forty years of frank and affectionate interchange of
ideas, they awoke to the painful consciousness that the last link of
mutual understanding had snapped and that their friendship was at an

end.
But the letters remain as a valuable and interesting record of one of
Tolstoy's rare friendships with