Anna Karenina

L >> Leo Tolstoy >> Anna Karenina


"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.

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 ash tray, 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.






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 before him, he would have been surprised at
nothing. But now, coming back to the world of reality, he had to
make great mental efforts to take in that she was alive and well,
and that the creature squalling so desperately was his son.
Kitty was alive, her agony was over. And he was unutterably
happy. That he understood; he was completely happy in it. But
the baby? Whence, why, who was he?... He could not get used to
the idea. It seemed to him something extraneous, superfluous, to
which he could not accustom himself.



Chapter 16


At ten o'clock the old prince, Sergey Ivanovitch, and Stepan
Arkadyevitch were sitting at Levin's. Having inquired after
Kitty, they had dropped into conversation upon other subjects.
Levin heard them, and unconsciously, as they talked, going over
the past, over what had been up to that morning, he thought of
himself as he had been yesterday till that point. It was as
though a hundred years had passed since then. He felt himself
exalted to unattainable heights, from which he studiously lowered
himself so as not to wound the people he was talking to. He
talked, and was all the time thinking of his wife, of her
condition now, of his son, in whose existence he tried to school
himself into believing. The whole world of woman, which had
taken for him since his marriage a new value he had never
suspected before, was now so exalted that he could not take it in
in his imagination. He heard them talk of yesterday's dinner at
the club, and thought: "What is happening with her now? Is she
asleep? How is she? What is she thinking of? Is he crying, my
son Dmitri?" And in the middle of the conversation, in the
middle of a sentence, he jumped up and went out of the room.

"Send me word if I can see her," said the prince.

"Very well, in a minute," answered Levin, and without stopping,
he went to her room.

She was not asleep, she was talking gently with her mother,
making plans about the christening.

Carefully set to rights, with hair well-brushed, in a smart
little cap with some blue in it, her arms out on the quilt, she
was lying on her back. Meeting his eyes, her eyes drew him to
her. Her face, bright before, brightened still more as he drew
near her. There was the same change in it from earthly to
unearthly that is seen in the face of the dead. But then it
means farewell, here it meant welcome. Again a rush of emotion,
such as he had felt at the moment of the child's birth, flooded
his heart. She took his hand and asked him if he had slept. He
could not answer, and turned away, struggling with his weakness.

"I have had a nap, Kostya!" she said to him; "and I am so
comfortable now."

She looked at him, but suddenly her expression changed.

"Give him to me," she said, hearing the baby's cry. "Give him to
me, Lizaveta Petrovna, and he shall look at him."

"To be sure, his papa shall look at him," said Lizaveta Petrovna,
getting up and bringing something red, and queer, and wriggling.
"Wait a minute, we'll make him tidy first," and Lizaveta
Petrovna laid the red wobbling thing on the bed, began untrussing
and trussing up the baby, lifting it up and turning it over with
one finger and powdering it with something.

Levin, looking at the tiny, pitiful creature, made strenuous
efforts to discover in his heart some traces of fatherly feeling
for it. He felt nothing towards it but disgust. But when it was
undressed and he caught a glimpse of wee, wee, little hands,
little feet, saffron-colored, with little toes, too, and
positively with a little big toe different from the rest, and
when he saw Lizaveta Petrovna closing the wide-open little hands,
as though they were soft springs, and putting them into linen
garments, such pity for the little creature came upon him, and
such terror that she would hurt it, that he held her hand back.

Lizaveta Petrovna laughed.

"Don't be frightened, don't be frightened!"

When the baby had been put to rights and transformed into a firm
doll, Lizaveta Petrovna dandled it as though proud of her
handiwork, and stood a little away so that Levin might see his
son in all his glory.

Kitty looked sideways in the same direction, never taking her
eyes off the baby. "Give him to me! give him to me!" she said,
and even made as though she would sit up.

"What are you thinking of, Katerina Alexandrovna, you mustn't
move like that! Wait a minute. I'll give him to you. Here
we're showing papa what a fine fellow we are!"

And Lizaveta Petrovna, with one hand supporting the wobbling
head, lifted up on the other arm the strange, limp, red creature,
whose head was lost in its swaddling clothes. But it had a nose,
too, and slanting eyes and smacking lips.

"A splendid baby!" said Lizaveta Petrovna.

Levin sighed with mortification. This splendid baby excited in
him no feeling but disgust and compassion. It was not at all the
feeling he had looked forward to.

He turned away while Lizaveta Petrovna put the baby to the
unaccustomed breast.

Suddenly laughter made him look round. The baby had taken the
breast.

"Come, that's enough, that's enough!" said Lizaveta Petrovna, but
Kitty would not let the baby go. He fell asleep in her arms.

"Look, now," said Kitty, turning the baby so that he could see
it. The aged-looking little face suddenly puckered up still more
and the baby sneezed.

Smiling, hardly able to restrain his tears, Levin kissed his wife
and went out of the dark room. What he felt towards this little
creature was utterly unlike what he had expected. There was
nothing cheerful and joyous in the feeling; on the contrary, it
was a new torture of apprehension. It was the consciousness of a
new sphere of liability to pain. And this sense was so painful
at first, the apprehension lest this helpless creature should
suffer was so intense, that it prevented him from noticing the
strange thrill of senseless joy and even pride that he had felt
when the baby sneezed.



Chapter 17


Stepan Arkadyevitch's affairs were in a very bad way.

The money for two-thirds of the forest had all been spent
already, and he had borrowed from the merchant in advance at ten
per cent discount, almost all the remaining third. The merchant
would not give more, especially as Darya Alexandrovna, for the
first time that winter insisting on her right to her own
property, had refused to sign the receipt for the payment of the
last third of the forest. All his salary went on household
expenses and in payment of petty debts that could not be put off.
There was positively no money.

This was unpleasant and awkward, and in Stepan Arkadyevitch's
opinion things could not go on like this. The explanation of the
position was, in his view, to be found in the fact that his
salary was too small. The post he filled had been unmistakably
very good five years ago, but it was so no longer.

Petrov, the bank director, had twelve thousand; Sventitsky, a
company director, had seventeen thousand; Mitin, who had founded
a bank, received fifty thousand.

"Clearly I've been napping, and they've overlooked me," Stepan
Arkadyevitch thought about himself. And he began keeping his
eyes and ears open, and towards the end of the winter he had
discovered a very good berth and had formed a plan of attack upon
it, at first from Moscow through aunts, uncles, and friends, and
then, when the matter was well advanced, in the spring, he went
himself to Petersburg. It was one of those snug, lucrative
berths of which there are so many more nowadays than there used
to be, with incomes ranging from one thousand to fifty thousand
roubles. It was the post of secretary of the committee of the
amalgamated agency of the southern railways, and of certain
banking companies. This position, like all such appointments,
called for such immense energy and such varied qualifications,
that it was difficult for them to be found united in any one man.
And since a man combining all the qualifications was not to be
found, it was at least better that the post be filled by an
honest than by a dishonest man. And Stepan Arkadyevitch was not
merely an honest man--unemphatically--in the common acceptation
of the words, he was an honest man--emphatically--in that special
sense which the word has in Moscow, when they talk of an "honest"
politician, an "honest" writer, an "honest" newspaper, an
"honest" institution, an "honest" tendency, meaning not simply
that the man or the institution is not dishonest, but that they
are capable on occasion of taking a line of their own in
opposition to the authorities.

Stepan Arkadyevitch moved in those circles in Moscow in which
that expression had come into use, was regarded there as an
honest man, and so had more right to this appointment than
others.

The appointment yielded an income of from seven to ten thousand a
year, and Oblonsky could fill it without giving up his government
position. It was in the hands of two ministers, one lady, and
two Jews, and all these people, though the way had been paved
already with them, Stepan Arkadyevitch had to see in Petersburg.
Besides this business, Stepan Arkadyevitch had promised his
sister Anna to obtain from Karenin a definite answer on the
question of divorce. And begging fifty roubles from Dolly, he
set off for Petersburg.

Stepan Arkadyevitch sat in Karenin's study listening to his
report on the causes of the unsatisfactory position of Russian
finance, and only waiting for the moment when he would finish to
speak about his own business or about Anna.

"Yes, that's very true," he said, when Alexey Alexandrovitch took
off the pince-nez, without which he could not read now, and
looked inquiringly at his former brother-in-law, "that's very
true in particular cases, but still the principle of our day is
freedom."

"Yes, but I lay down another principle, embracing the principle
of freedom," said Alexey Alexandrovitch, with emphasis on the
word "embracing," and he put on his pince-nez again, so as to
read the passage in which this statement was made. And turning
over the beautifully written, wide-margined manuscript, Alexey
Alexandrovitch read aloud over again the conclusive passage.

"I don't advocate protection for the sake of private interests,
but for the public weal, and for the lower and upper classes
equally," he said, looking over his pince-nez at Oblonsky. "But
_they_ cannot grasp that, _they_ are taken up now with personal
interests, and carried away by phrases."

Stepan Arkadyevitch knew that when Karenin began to talk of what
_they_ were doing and thinking, the persons who would not accept
his report and were the cause of everything wrong in Russia, that
it was coming near the end. And so now he eagerly abandoned the
principle of free-trade, and fully agreed. Alexey Alexandrovitch
paused, thoughtfully turning over the pages of his manuscript.

"Oh, by the way," said Stepan Arkadyevitch, "I wanted to ask
you, some time when you see Pomorsky, to drop him a hint that I
should be very glad to get that new appointment of secretary of
the committee of the amalgamated agency of the southern railways
and banking companies." Stepan Arkadyevitch was familiar by now
with the title of the post he coveted, and he brought it out
rapidly without mistake.

Alexey Alexandrovitch questioned him as to the duties of this new
committee, and pondered. He was considering whether the new
committee would not be acting in some way contrary to the views
he had been advocating. But as the influence of the new
committee was of a very complex nature, and his views were of
very wide application, he could not decide this straight off, and
taking off his pince-nez, he said: