Anna Karenina
“But what do you think, Pyotr Dmitrievitch? Do you suppose it may go
all right?”
“Everything points to a favorable issue.”
“So you’ll come immediately?” said Levin, looking wrathfully at the
servant who was bringing in the coffee.
“In an hour’s time.”
“Oh, for mercy’s sake!”
“Well, let me drink my coffee, anyway.”
The doctor started upon his coffee. Both were silent.
“The Turks are really getting beaten, though. Did you read yesterday’s
telegrams?” said the doctor, munching some roll.
“No, I can’t stand it!” said Levin, jumping up. “So you’ll be with us
in a quarter of an hour.”
“In half an hour.”
“On your honor?”
When Levin got home, he drove up at the same time as the princess, and
they went up to the bedroom door together. The princess had tears in
her eyes, and her hands were shaking. Seeing Levin, she embraced him,
and burst into tears.
“Well, my dear Lizaveta Petrovna?” she queried, clasping the hand of
the midwife, who came out to meet them with a beaming and anxious face.
“She’s going on well,” she said; “persuade her to lie down. She will be
easier so.”
From the moment when he had waked up and understood what was going on,
Levin had prepared his mind to bear resolutely what was before him, and
without considering or anticipating anything, to avoid upsetting his
wife, and on the contrary to soothe her and keep up her courage.
Without allowing himself even to think of what was to come, of how it
would end, judging from his inquiries as to the usual duration of these
ordeals, Levin had in his imagination braced himself to bear up and to
keep a tight rein on his feelings for five hours, and it had seemed to
him he could do this. But when he came back from the doctor’s and saw
her sufferings again, he fell to repeating more and more frequently:
“Lord, have mercy on us, and succor us!” He sighed, and flung his head
up, and began to feel afraid he could not bear it, that he would burst
into tears or run away. Such agony it was to him. And only one hour had
passed.
But after that hour there passed another hour, two hours, three, the
full five hours he had fixed as the furthest limit of his sufferings,
and the position was still unchanged; and he was still bearing it
because there was nothing to be done but bear it; every instant feeling
that he had reached the utmost limits of his endurance, and that his
heart would break with sympathy and pain.
But still the minutes passed by and the hours, and still hours more,
and his misery and horror grew and were more and more intense.
All the ordinary conditions of life, without which one can form no
conception of anything, had ceased to exist for Levin. He lost all
sense of time. Minutes—those minutes when she sent for him and he held
her moist hand, that would squeeze his hand with extraordinary violence
and then push it away—seemed to him hours, and hours seemed to him
minutes. He was surprised when Lizaveta Petrovna asked him to light a
candle behind a screen, and he found that it was five o’clock in the
afternoon. If he had been told it was only ten o’clock in the morning,
he would not have been more surprised. Where he was all this time, he
knew as little as the time of anything. He saw her swollen face,
sometimes bewildered and in agony, sometimes smiling and trying to
reassure him. He saw the old princess too, flushed and overwrought,
with her gray curls in disorder, forcing herself to gulp down her
tears, biting her lips; he saw Dolly too and the doctor, smoking fat
cigarettes, and Lizaveta Petrovna with a firm, resolute, reassuring
face, and the old prince walking up and down the hall with a frowning
face. But why they came in and went out, where they were, he did not
know. The princess was with the doctor in the bedroom, then in the
study, where a table set for dinner suddenly appeared; then she was not
there, but Dolly was. Then Levin remembered he had been sent somewhere.
Once he had been sent to move a table and sofa. He had done this
eagerly, thinking it had to be done for her sake, and only later on he
found it was his own bed he had been getting ready. Then he had been
sent to the study to ask the doctor something. The doctor had answered
and then had said something about the irregularities in the municipal
council. Then he had been sent to the bedroom to help the old princess
to move the holy picture in its silver and gold setting, and with the
princess’s old waiting maid he had clambered on a shelf to reach it and
had broken the little lamp, and the old servant had tried to reassure
him about the lamp and about his wife, and he carried the holy picture
and set it at Kitty’s head, carefully tucking it in behind the pillow.
But where, when, and why all this had happened, he could not tell. He
did not understand why the old princess took his hand, and looking
compassionately at him, begged him not to worry himself, and Dolly
persuaded him to eat something and led him out of the room, and even
the doctor looked seriously and with commiseration at him and offered
him a drop of something.
All he knew and felt was that what was happening was what had happened
nearly a year before in the hotel of the country town at the deathbed
of his brother Nikolay. But that had been grief—this was joy. Yet that
grief and this joy were alike outside all the ordinary conditions of
life; they were loop-holes, as it were, in that ordinary life through
which there came glimpses of something sublime. And in the
contemplation of this sublime something the soul was exalted to
inconceivable heights of which it had before had no conception, while
reason lagged behind, unable to keep up with it.
“Lord, have mercy on us, and succor us!” he repeated to himself
incessantly, feeling, in spite of his long and, as it seemed, complete
alienation from religion, that he turned to God just as trustfully and
simply as he had in his childhood and first youth.
All this time he had two distinct spiritual conditions. One was away
from her, with the doctor, who kept smoking one fat cigarette after
another and extinguishing them on the edge of a full ashtray, with
Dolly, and with the old prince, where there was talk about dinner,
about politics, about Marya Petrovna’s illness, and where Levin
suddenly forgot for a minute what was happening, and felt as though he
had waked up from sleep; the other was in her presence, at her pillow,
where his heart seemed breaking and still did not break from
sympathetic suffering, and he prayed to God without ceasing. And every
time he was brought back from a moment of oblivion by a scream reaching
him from the bedroom, he fell into the same strange terror that had
come upon him the first minute. Every time he heard a shriek, he jumped
up, ran to justify himself, remembered on the way that he was not to
blame, and he longed to defend her, to help her. But as he looked at
her, he saw again that help was impossible, and he was filled with
terror and prayed: “Lord, have mercy on us, and help us!” And as time
went on, both these conditions became more intense; the calmer he
became away from her, completely forgetting her, the more agonizing
became both her sufferings and his feeling of helplessness before them.
He jumped up, would have liked to run away, but ran to her.
Sometimes, when again and again she called upon him, he blamed her; but
seeing her patient, smiling face, and hearing the words, “I am worrying
you,” he threw the blame on God; but thinking of God, at once he fell
to beseeching God to forgive him and have mercy.
Chapter 15
He did not know whether it was late or early. The candles had all
burned out. Dolly had just been in the study and had suggested to the
doctor that he should lie down. Levin sat listening to the doctor’s
stories of a quack mesmerizer and looking at the ashes of his
cigarette. There had been a period of repose, and he had sunk into
oblivion. He had completely forgotten what was going on now. He heard
the doctor’s chat and understood it. Suddenly there came an unearthly
shriek. The shriek was so awful that Levin did not even jump up, but
holding his breath, gazed in terrified inquiry at the doctor. The
doctor put his head on one side, listened, and smiled approvingly.
Everything was so extraordinary that nothing could strike Levin as
strange. “I suppose it must be so,” he thought, and still sat where he
was. Whose scream was this? He jumped up, ran on tiptoe to the bedroom,
edged round Lizaveta Petrovna and the princess, and took up his
position at Kitty’s pillow. The scream had subsided, but there was some
change now. What it was he did not see and did not comprehend, and he
had no wish to see or comprehend. But he saw it by the face of Lizaveta
Petrovna. Lizaveta Petrovna’s face was stern and pale, and still as
resolute, though her jaws were twitching, and her eyes were fixed
intently on Kitty. Kitty’s swollen and agonized face, a tress of hair
clinging to her moist brow, was turned to him and sought his eyes. Her
lifted hands asked for his hands. Clutching his chill hands in her
moist ones, she began squeezing them to her face.
“Don’t go, don’t go! I’m not afraid, I’m not afraid!” she said rapidly.
“Mamma, take my earrings. They bother me. You’re not afraid? Quick,
quick, Lizaveta Petrovna....”
She spoke quickly, very quickly, and tried to smile. But suddenly her
face was drawn, she pushed him away.
“Oh, this is awful! I’m dying, I’m dying! Go away!” she shrieked, and
again he heard that unearthly scream.
Levin clutched at his head and ran out of the room.
“It’s nothing, it’s nothing, it’s all right,” Dolly called after him.
But they might say what they liked, he knew now that all was over. He
stood in the next room, his head leaning against the door post, and
heard shrieks, howls such as he had never heard before, and he knew
that what had been Kitty was uttering these shrieks. He had long ago
ceased to wish for the child. By now he loathed this child. He did not
even wish for her life now, all he longed for was the end of this awful
anguish.
“Doctor! What is it? What is it? By God!” he said, snatching at the
doctor’s hand as he came up.
“It’s the end,” said the doctor. And the doctor’s face was so grave as
he said it that Levin took _the end_ as meaning her death.
Beside himself, he ran into the bedroom. The first thing he saw was the
face of Lizaveta Petrovna. It was even more frowning and stern. Kitty’s
face he did not know. In the place where it had been was something that
was fearful in its strained distortion and in the sounds that came from
it. He fell down with his head on the wooden framework of the bed,
feeling that his heart was bursting. The awful scream never paused, it
became still more awful, and as though it had reached the utmost limit
of terror, suddenly it ceased. Levin could not believe his ears, but
there could be no doubt; the scream had ceased and he heard a subdued
stir and bustle, and hurried breathing, and her voice, gasping, alive,
tender, and blissful, uttered softly, “It’s over!”
He lifted his head. With her hands hanging exhausted on the quilt,
looking extraordinarily lovely and serene, she looked at him in silence
and tried to smile, and could not.
And suddenly, from the mysterious and awful far-away world in which he
had been living for the last twenty-two hours, Levin felt himself all
in an instant borne back to the old every-day world, glorified though
now, by such a radiance of happiness that he could not bear it. The
strained chords snapped, sobs and tears of joy which he had never
foreseen rose up with such violence that his whole body shook, that for
long they prevented him from speaking.
Falling on his knees before the bed, he held his wife’s hand before his