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
lips and kissed it, and the hand, with a weak movement of the fingers,
responded to his kiss. And meanwhile, there at the foot of the bed, in the
deft hands of Lizaveta Petrovna, like a flickering light in a lamp, lay the life
of a human creature, which had never existed before, and which would now
with the same right, with the same importance to itself, live and create in its
own image.
“Alive! alive! And a boy too! Set your mind at rest!” Levin heard
Lizaveta Petrovna saying, as she slapped the baby’s back with a shaking
hand.
“Mamma, is it true?” said Kitty’s voice.
The princess’s sobs were all the answers she could make. And in the
midst of the silence there came in unmistakable reply to the mother’s
question, a voice quite unlike the subdued voices speaking in the room. It
was the bold, clamorous, self-assertive squall of the new human being, who
had so incomprehensibly appeared.
If Levin had been told before that Kitty was dead, and that he had died
with her, and that their children were angels, and that God was standing
