Anna Karenina by graf Leo Tolstoy
Chapter 207
1050 words | Chapter 207
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.
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