then instead of that—disgust, pity….”
She listened attentively, looking at him over the baby, while she put back
on her slender fingers the rings she had taken off while giving Mitya his
bath.
“And most of all, at there being far more apprehension and pity than
pleasure. Today, after that fright during the storm, I understand how I love
him.”
Kitty’s smile was radiant.
“Were you very much frightened?” she said. “So was I too, but I feel it
more now that it’s over. I’m going to look at the oak. How nice Katavasov
is! And what a happy day we’ve had altogether. And you’re so nice with
Sergey Ivanovitch, when you care to be…. Well, go back to them. It’s
always so hot and steamy here after the bath.”
Chapter 19
Going out of the nursery and being again alone, Levin went back at once
to the thought, in which there was something not clear.
Instead of going into the drawing-room, where he heard voices, he
stopped on the terrace, and leaning his elbows on the parapet, he gazed up
at the sky.
It was quite dark now, and in the south, where he was looking, there were
no clouds. The storm had drifted on to the opposite side of the sky, and
there were flashes of lightning and distant thunder from that quarter. Levin
listened to the monotonous drip from the lime trees in the garden, and
looked at the triangle of stars he knew so well, and the Milky Way with its
branches that ran through its midst. At each flash of lightning the Milky
Way, and even the bright stars, vanished, but as soon as the lightning died
away, they reappeared in their places as though some hand had flung them
back with careful aim.
“Well, what is it perplexes me?” Levin said to himself, feeling
beforehand that the solution of his difficulties was ready in his soul, though
he did not know it yet. “Yes, the one unmistakable, incontestable
manifestation of the Divinity is the law of right and wrong, which has come
into the world by revelation, and which I feel in myself, and in the
recognition of which—I don’t make myself, but whether I will or not—I am
made one with other men in one body of believers, which is called the
church. Well, but the Jews, the Mohammedans, the Confucians, the
Buddhists—what of them?” he put to himself the question he had feared to
face. “Can these hundreds of millions of men be deprived of that highest
blessing without which life has no meaning?” He pondered a moment, but
immediately corrected himself. “But what am I questioning?” he said to
himself. “I am questioning the relation to Divinity of all the different
religions of all mankind. I am questioning the universal manifestation of
God to all the world with all those misty blurs. What am I about? To me
individually, to my heart has been revealed a knowledge beyond all doubt,
and unattainable by reason, and here I am obstinately trying to express that
knowledge in reason and words.
“Don’t I know that the stars don’t move?” he asked himself, gazing at the
bright planet which had shifted its position up to the topmost twig of the
birch-tree. “But looking at the movements of the stars, I can’t picture to
myself the rotation of the earth, and I’m right in saying that the stars move.
“And could the astronomers have understood and calculated anything, if
they had taken into account all the complicated and varied motions of the
earth? All the marvelous conclusions they have reached about the distances,
weights, movements, and deflections of the heavenly bodies are only
founded on the apparent motions of the heavenly bodies about a stationary
earth, on that very motion I see before me now, which has been so for
millions of men during long ages, and was and will be always alike, and can
always be trusted. And just as the conclusions of the astronomers would
have been vain and uncertain if not founded on observations of the seen
heavens, in relation to a single meridian and a single horizon, so would my
conclusions be vain and uncertain if not founded on that conception of
right, which has been and will be always alike for all men, which has been
revealed to me as a Christian, and which can always be trusted in my soul.
The question of other religions and their relations to Divinity I have no right
to decide, and no possibility of deciding.”
“Oh, you haven’t gone in then?” he heard Kitty’s voice all at once, as she
came by the same way to the drawing-room.
“What is it? you’re not worried about anything?” she said, looking
intently at his face in the starlight.
But she could not have seen his face if a flash of lightning had not hidden
the stars and revealed it. In that flash she saw his face distinctly, and seeing
him calm and happy, she smiled at him.
“She understands,” he thought; “she knows what I’m thinking about.
Shall I tell her or not? Yes, I’ll tell her.” But at the moment he was about to
speak, she began speaking.
“Kostya! do something for me,” she said; “go into the corner room and
see if they’ve made it all right for Sergey Ivanovitch. I can’t very well. See
if they’ve put the new wash stand in it.”
“Very well, I’ll go directly,” said Levin, standing up and kissing her.
“No, I’d better not speak of it,” he thought, when she had gone in before
him. “It is a secret for me alone, of vital importance for me, and not to be
put into words.
“This new feeling has not changed me, has not made me happy and
enlightened all of a sudden, as I had dreamed, just like the feeling for my
child. There was no surprise in this either. Faith—or not faith—I don’t
know what it is—but this feeling has come just as imperceptibly through
suffering, and has taken firm root in my soul.
“I shall go on in the same way, losing my temper with Ivan the
coachman, falling into angry discussions, expressing my opinions
tactlessly; there will be still the same wall between the holy of holies of my
soul and other people, even my wife; I shall still go on scolding her for my
own terror, and being remorseful for it; I shall still be as unable to
understand with my reason why I pray, and I shall still go on praying; but
my life now, my whole life apart from anything that can happen to me,
every minute of it is no more meaningless, as it was before, but it has the
positive meaning of goodness, which I have the power to put into it.”
