At the corner he met a night cabman driving hurriedly. In the little sledge,
wrapped in a velvet cloak, sat Lizaveta Petrovna with a kerchief round her
head. “Thank God! thank God!” he said, overjoyed to recognize her little
fair face which wore a peculiarly serious, even stern expression. Telling the
driver not to stop, he ran along beside her.
“For two hours, then? Not more?” she inquired. “You should let Pyotr
Dmitrievitch know, but don’t hurry him. And get some opium at the
chemist’s.”
“So you think that it may go on well? Lord have mercy on us and help
us!” Levin said, seeing his own horse driving out of the gate. Jumping into
the sledge beside Kouzma, he told him to drive to the doctor’s.
Chapter 14
The doctor was not yet up, and the footman said that “he had been up
late, and had given orders not to be waked, but would get up soon.” The
footman was cleaning the lamp-chimneys, and seemed very busy about
them. This concentration of the footman upon his lamps, and his
indifference to what was passing in Levin, at first astounded him, but
immediately on considering the question he realized that no one knew or
was bound to know his feelings, and that it was all the more necessary to
act calmly, sensibly, and resolutely to get through this wall of indifference
and attain his aim.
“Don’t be in a hurry or let anything slip,” Levin said to himself, feeling a
greater and greater flow of physical energy and attention to all that lay
before him to do.
Having ascertained that the doctor was not getting up, Levin considered
various plans, and decided on the following one: that Kouzma should go for
another doctor, while he himself should go to the chemist’s for opium, and
if when he came back the doctor had not yet begun to get up, he would
either by tipping the footman, or by force, wake the doctor at all hazards.
At the chemist’s the lank shopman sealed up a packet of powders for a
coachman who stood waiting, and refused him opium with the same
callousness with which the doctor’s footman had cleaned his lamp
chimneys. Trying not to get flurried or out of temper, Levin mentioned the
names of the doctor and midwife, and explaining what the opium was
needed for, tried to persuade him. The assistant inquired in German whether
he should give it, and receiving an affirmative reply from behind the
partition, he took out a bottle and a funnel, deliberately poured the opium
from a bigger bottle into a little one, stuck on a label, sealed it up, in spite
of Levin’s request that he would not do so, and was about to wrap it up too.
This was more than Levin could stand; he took the bottle firmly out of his
hands, and ran to the big glass doors. The doctor was not even now getting
up, and the footman, busy now in putting down the rugs, refused to wake
him. Levin deliberately took out a ten rouble note, and, careful to speak
slowly, though losing no time over the business, he handed him the note,
and explained that Pyotr Dmitrievitch (what a great and important
personage he seemed to Levin now, this Pyotr Dmitrievitch, who had been
of so little consequence in his eyes before!) had promised to come at any
time; that he would certainly not be angry! and that he must therefore wake
him at once.
The footman agreed, and went upstairs, taking Levin into the waiting
room.
Levin could hear through the door the doctor coughing, moving about,
washing, and saying something. Three minutes passed; it seemed to Levin
that more than an hour had gone by. He could not wait any longer.
“Pyotr Dmitrievitch, Pyotr Dmitrievitch!” he said in an imploring voice
at the open door. “For God’s sake, forgive me! See me as you are. It’s been
going on more than two hours already.”
“In a minute; in a minute!” answered a voice, and to his amazement
Levin heard that the doctor was smiling as he spoke.
“For one instant.”
“In a minute.”
Two minutes more passed while the doctor was putting on his boots, and
two minutes more while the doctor put on his coat and combed his hair.
“Pyotr Dmitrievitch!” Levin was beginning again in a plaintive voice,
just as the doctor came in dressed and ready. “These people have no
conscience,” thought Levin. “Combing his hair, while we’re dying!”
“Good morning!” the doctor said to him, shaking hands, and, as it were,
teasing him with his composure. “There’s no hurry. Well now?”
Trying to be as accurate as possible, Levin began to tell him every
unnecessary detail of his wife’s condition, interrupting his account
repeatedly with entreaties that the doctor would come with him at once.
“Oh, you needn’t be in any hurry. You don’t understand, you know. I’m
certain I’m not wanted, still I’ve promised, and if you like, I’ll come. But
there’s no hurry. Please sit down; won’t you have some coffee?”
Levin stared at him with eyes that asked whether he was laughing at him;
but the doctor had no notion of making fun of him.
“I know, I know,” the doctor said, smiling; “I’m a married man myself;
and at these moments we husbands are very much to be pitied. I’ve a patient
whose husband always takes refuge in the stables on such occasions.”
“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.
