Anna Karenina
The sick man said nothing.
“What am I to write to him?” said Levin. “I hope you are not angry with
him?”
“No, not the least!” Nikolay answered, vexed at the question. “Tell him
to send me a doctor.”
Three more days of agony followed; the sick man was still in the same
condition. The sense of longing for his death was felt by everyone now
at the mere sight of him, by the waiters and the hotel-keeper and all
the people staying in the hotel, and the doctor and Marya Nikolaevna
and Levin and Kitty. The sick man alone did not express this feeling,
but on the contrary was furious at their not getting him doctors, and
went on taking medicine and talking of life. Only at rare moments, when
the opium gave him an instant’s relief from the never-ceasing pain, he
would sometimes, half asleep, utter what was ever more intense in his
heart than in all the others: “Oh, if it were only the end!” or: “When
will it be over?”
His sufferings, steadily growing more intense, did their work and
prepared him for death. There was no position in which he was not in
pain, there was not a minute in which he was unconscious of it, not a
limb, not a part of his body that did not ache and cause him agony.
Even the memories, the impressions, the thoughts of this body awakened
in him now the same aversion as the body itself. The sight of other
people, their remarks, his own reminiscences, everything was for him a
source of agony. Those about him felt this, and instinctively did not
allow themselves to move freely, to talk, to express their wishes
before him. All his life was merged in the one feeling of suffering and
desire to be rid of it.
There was evidently coming over him that revulsion that would make him
look upon death as the goal of his desires, as happiness. Hitherto each
individual desire, aroused by suffering or privation, such as hunger,
fatigue, thirst, had been satisfied by some bodily function giving
pleasure. But now no physical craving or suffering received relief, and
the effort to relieve them only caused fresh suffering. And so all
desires were merged in one—the desire to be rid of all his sufferings
and their source, the body. But he had no words to express this desire
of deliverance, and so he did not speak of it, and from habit asked for
the satisfaction of desires which could not now be satisfied. “Turn me
over on the other side,” he would say, and immediately after he would
ask to be turned back again as before. “Give me some broth. Take away
the broth. Talk of something: why are you silent?” And directly they
began to talk he would close his eyes, and would show weariness,
indifference, and loathing.
On the tenth day from their arrival at the town, Kitty was unwell. She
suffered from headache and sickness, and she could not get up all the
morning.
The doctor opined that the indisposition arose from fatigue and
excitement, and prescribed rest.
After dinner, however, Kitty got up and went as usual with her work to
the sick man. He looked at her sternly when she came in, and smiled
contemptuously when she said she had been unwell. That day he was
continually blowing his nose, and groaning piteously.
“How do you feel?” she asked him.
“Worse,” he articulated with difficulty. “In pain!”
“In pain, where?”
“Everywhere.”
“It will be over today, you will see,” said Marya Nikolaevna. Though it
was said in a whisper, the sick man, whose hearing Levin had noticed
was very keen, must have heard. Levin said hush to her, and looked
round at the sick man. Nikolay had heard; but these words produced no
effect on him. His eyes had still the same intense, reproachful look.
“Why do you think so?” Levin asked her, when she had followed him into
the corridor.
“He has begun picking at himself,” said Marya Nikolaevna.
“How do you mean?”
“Like this,” she said, tugging at the folds of her woolen skirt. Levin
noticed, indeed, that all that day the patient pulled at himself, as it
were, trying to snatch something away.
Marya Nikolaevna’s prediction came true. Towards night the sick man was
not able to lift his hands, and could only gaze before him with the
same intensely concentrated expression in his eyes. Even when his
brother or Kitty bent over him, so that he could see them, he looked
just the same. Kitty sent for the priest to read the prayer for the
dying.
While the priest was reading it, the dying man did not show any sign of
life; his eyes were closed. Levin, Kitty, and Marya Nikolaevna stood at
the bedside. The priest had not quite finished reading the prayer when
the dying man stretched, sighed, and opened his eyes. The priest, on
finishing the prayer, put the cross to the cold forehead, then slowly
returned it to the stand, and after standing for two minutes more in
silence, he touched the huge, bloodless hand that was turning cold.
“He is gone,” said the priest, and would have moved away; but suddenly
there was a faint stir in the mustaches of the dead man that seemed
glued together, and quite distinctly in the hush they heard from the
bottom of the chest the sharply defined sounds:
“Not quite ... soon.”
And a minute later the face brightened, a smile came out under the
mustaches, and the women who had gathered round began carefully laying
out the corpse.
The sight of his brother, and the nearness of death, revived in Levin
that sense of horror in face of the insoluble enigma, together with the
nearness and inevitability of death, that had come upon him that autumn
evening when his brother had come to him. This feeling was now even
stronger than before; even less than before did he feel capable of
apprehending the meaning of death, and its inevitability rose up before
him more terrible than ever. But now, thanks to his wife’s presence,
that feeling did not reduce him to despair. In spite of death, he felt
the need of life and love. He felt that love saved him from despair,
and that this love, under the menace of despair, had become still
stronger and purer. The one mystery of death, still unsolved, had
scarcely passed before his eyes, when another mystery had arisen, as
insoluble, urging him to love and to life.
The doctor confirmed his suppositions in regard to Kitty. Her
indisposition was a symptom that she was with child.
Chapter 21
From the moment when Alexey Alexandrovitch understood from his
interviews with Betsy and with Stepan Arkadyevitch that all that was
expected of him was to leave his wife in peace, without burdening her
with his presence, and that his wife herself desired this, he felt so
distraught that he could come to no decision of himself; he did not
know himself what he wanted now, and putting himself in the hands of
those who were so pleased to interest themselves in his affairs, he met
everything with unqualified assent. It was only when Anna had left his
house, and the English governess sent to ask him whether she should
dine with him or separately, that for the first time he clearly
comprehended his position, and was appalled by it. Most difficult of
all in this position was the fact that he could not in any way connect
and reconcile his past with what was now. It was not the past when he
had lived happily with his wife that troubled him. The transition from
that past to a knowledge of his wife’s unfaithfulness he had lived
through miserably already; that state was painful, but he could
understand it. If his wife had then, on declaring to him her
unfaithfulness, left him, he would have been wounded, unhappy, but he
would not have been in the hopeless position—incomprehensible to
himself—in which he felt himself now. He could not now reconcile his
immediate past, his tenderness, his love for his sick wife, and for the
other man’s child with what was now the case, that is with the fact
that, as it were, in return for all this he now found himself alone,
put to shame, a laughing-stock, needed by no one, and despised by
everyone.
For the first two days after his wife’s departure Alexey Alexandrovitch
received applicants for assistance and his chief secretary, drove to
the committee, and went down to dinner in the dining-room as usual.
Without giving himself a reason for what he was doing, he strained
every nerve of his being for those two days, simply to preserve an
appearance of composure, and even of indifference. Answering inquiries
about the disposition of Anna Arkadyevna’s rooms and belongings, he had
exercised immense self-control to appear like a man in whose eyes what
had occurred was not unforeseen nor out of the ordinary course of
events, and he attained his aim: no one could have detected in him
signs of despair. But on the second day after her departure, when
Korney gave him a bill from a fashionable draper’s shop, which Anna had
forgotten to pay, and announced that the clerk from the shop was
waiting, Alexey Alexandrovitch told him to show the clerk up.
“Excuse me, your excellency, for venturing to trouble you. But if you
direct us to apply to her excellency, would you graciously oblige us
with her address?”
Alexey Alexandrovitch pondered, as it seemed to the clerk, and all at
once, turning round, he sat down at the table. Letting his head sink
into his hands, he sat for a long while in that position, several times
attempted to speak and stopped short. Korney, perceiving his master’s
emotion, asked the clerk to call another time. Left alone, Alexey
Alexandrovitch recognized that he had not the strength to keep up the
line of firmness and composure any longer. He gave orders for the
carriage that was awaiting him to be taken back, and for no one to be
admitted, and he did not go down to dinner.
He felt that he could not endure the weight of universal contempt and
exasperation, which he had distinctly seen in the face of the clerk and
of Korney, and of everyone, without exception, whom he had met during
those two days. He felt that he could not turn aside from himself the
hatred of men, because that hatred did not come from his being bad (in
that case he could have tried to be better), but from his being
shamefully and repulsively unhappy. He knew that for this, for the very
fact that his heart was torn with grief, they would be merciless to
him. He felt that men would crush him as dogs strangle a torn dog
yelping with pain. He knew that his sole means of security against
people was to hide his wounds from them, and instinctively he tried to
do this for two days, but now he felt incapable of keeping up the
unequal struggle.
His despair was even intensified by the consciousness that he was
utterly alone in his sorrow. In all Petersburg there was not a human
being to whom he could express what he was feeling, who would feel for
him, not as a high official, not as a member of society, but simply as
a suffering man; indeed he had not such a one in the whole world.
Alexey Alexandrovitch grew up an orphan. There were two brothers. They
did not remember their father, and their mother died when Alexey
Alexandrovitch was ten years old. The property was a small one. Their
uncle, Karenin, a government official of high standing, at one time a
favorite of the late Tsar, had brought them up.
On completing his high school and university courses with medals,
Alexey Alexandrovitch had, with his uncle’s aid, immediately started in
a prominent position in the service, and from that time forward he had
devoted himself exclusively to political ambition. In the high school
and the university, and afterwards in the service, Alexey
Alexandrovitch had never formed a close friendship with anyone. His
brother had been the person nearest to his heart, but he had a post in
the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and was always abroad, where he had
died shortly after Alexey Alexandrovitch’s marriage.