She thought of the abandoned farmhouse, the proud hand-sewn standards of Vozdvizhenskoe, and all she had left behind her.
What have I done? Anna thought, looking wearily at Alexei Kirillovich. What have I traded for a love affair, which proves to be nothing more than an illusion?
CHAPTER 8
THERE ARE NO CONDITIONS to which a man cannot become used, especially if he sees that all around him are living in the same way. Levin could not have believed three months before that he could have gone quietly to sleep in the condition in which he was that day; that leading an aimless, irrational life, living too beyond his means, after drinking to excess (he could not call what happened at the club anything else), making an inappropriate call upon a woman who could only be called a lost woman, after being fascinated by that woman and causing his wife distress—he could still go quietly to sleep. But under the influence of fatigue, a sleepless night, and the wine he had drunk, his sleep was sound and untroubled.
At five o’clock the creak of a door opening woke him. He jumped up and looked round. Kitty was not in bed beside him. But there was a light moving behind the screen, and he heard her steps.
“What is it? . . . What is it?” he said, half asleep. “Kitty! What is it?”
“Nothing,” she said, coming from behind the screen with a candle in her hand. “I felt unwell,” she said, smiling a particularly sweet and meaningful smile.
“What? Has it begun?” he said in terror. “We ought to send . . . ,” and hurriedly he reached after his clothes.
“No, no,” she said, smiling and holding his hand. “It’s sure to be nothing. I was rather unwell, only a little. It’s all over now.”
And getting into bed, she blew out the candle—which the new servant had found in a box in the attic, after a Toy Soldier collected the lumières—lay down and was still. Though he thought her stillness suspicious, as though she were holding her breath, and still more suspicious the expression of peculiar tenderness and excitement with which, as she came from behind the screen, she had said “nothing,” he was so sleepy that he fell asleep at once. Only later he remembered the stillness of her breathing, and understood all that must have been passing in her sweet, precious heart while she lay beside him, not stirring, in anticipation of the greatest event in a woman’s life. At seven o’clock he was waked by the touch of her hand on his shoulder, and a gentle whisper. She seemed to be struggling between regret at waking him and the desire to talk to him.
“Kostya, don’t be frightened. It’s all right. But I fancy . . . we ought to send for the doctor.”
The candle was lighted again. She was sitting up in bed, holding some knitting, which she had been busy upon during the last few days.
“Please, don’t be frightened, it’s all right. I’m not a bit afraid,” she said, seeing his scared face, and she pressed his hand to her bosom and then to her lips.
He hurriedly jumped up, hardly awake, and kept his eyes fixed on her, as he put on his dressing gown; then he stopped, still looking at her. He had to go, but he could not tear himself from her eyes. He thought he loved her face, knew her expression, her eyes, but never had he seen it like this. How hateful and horrible he seemed to himself, thinking of the distress he had caused her yesterday. Her flushed face, fringed with soft, curling hair under her nightcap, was radiant with joy and courage.
Though there was so little that was complex or artificial in Kitty’s character in general, Levin was struck by what was revealed now, when suddenly all disguises were thrown off and the very kernel of her soul shone in her eyes. And in this simplicity and nakedness of her soul, she, the very woman he loved in her, was more manifest than ever. She looked at him, smiling; but all at once her brows twitched, she threw up her head, and going quickly up to him, clutched his hand and pressed close up to him, breathing her hot breath upon him. She was in pain and was, as it were, complaining to him of her suffering. And for the first minute, from habit, it seemed to him that he was to blame. But in her eyes there was a tenderness that told him that she was far from reproaching him, that she loved him for her sufferings. If not I, who is to blame for it? he thought, without even noticing that he was thinking instead of speaking; though thoughts of such importance, touching on life and death, would always in the past have been uttered aloud to his beloved-companion. She was suffering, complaining, and triumphing in her sufferings, and rejoicing in them, and loving them. He saw that something sublime was being accomplished in her soul, but what? He could not make it out. It was beyond his understanding.
“I have sent to Mamma. You go quickly to fetch the doctor . . . Kostya! . . . Nothing, it’s over. Well, go now. I am all right.”
And Levin saw with astonishment that she had taken up the knitting she had brought in during the night and begun working at it again. She was secure, serene, hardly even noticing that Tatiana was not with her. For so long Kitty and Levin had relied on their beloved-companions for support, but in this most human of situations, neither felt their absence.
He dressed, and after sending the new houseboy to prepare the horses—another new habit to get used to—Levin ran again up to the bedroom, not on tiptoe, it seemed to him, but on wings. Kitty was walking about knitting rapidly and giving directions to the servants.
“I’m going for the doctor.”
She looked at him, obviously not hearing what he was saying.
“Yes, yes. Do go,” she said quickly, frowning and waving her hand to him.
He had just gone into the drawing room, when suddenly a plaintive moan sounded from the bedroom, smothered instantly. He stood still, and for a long while he could not understand.
Yes, that is she, he said to himself, and clutching at his head he ran downstairs.
The horses were not yet ready, so, feeling a peculiar concentration of his physical forces and his intellect on what he had to do, he started off on foot without waiting.
CHAPTER 9
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 making a proper mess of the job.
Levin waited impatiently in the street for the doctor, and finally decided that he could wait no longer, and would burst in on the man and wake him if he had to. He stormed back toward the doctor’s door—but was stopped by a fat little man in a tattered lab coat, who appeared in the shadows holding a small silver box. This man was not Federov, but looked much like him: the same tangled beard, the same beady eyes, the tattered lab coat.
“Rearguard,” the man said gravely.
“Action,” Levin responded immediately.
The man stepped fully from the shadows. “Konstantin Dmitrich, my name is Dmitriev.”
“I cannot speak to you now! I have urgent business this night!”
“Not so urgent as this,” the agent of UnConSciya replied. “Levin, the time has come.”
“No,” Levin protested, his voice rising. “It cannot be tonight!” Levin moved to push past him, and the man who called himself Dmitriev scowled and pressed the button on his little box. Levin yelped in pain as he banged against some sort of radiating, semi-invisible bars, and a small electric shock quivered through his system.
“I am sorry,” said Dmitriev, scratching at his tangled beard. “But I require your complete attention.
His eyes wide with rage, Levin stared at the squat man in his shabby coat. “Why do you encage me? I am with you! And I swear to you that tomorrow I shall offer whatever aid I can. Only you must find me tomorrow.”
“We do not have the luxury of waiting for tomorrow. We have a chance to stop the furnaces, tonight, to halt the melting down of the Class Ills. But we require a man trusted in society, a man beyond suspicion, and we need him tonight.”
“Then you must find another man!” Levin threw himself at the invisible enclosure, and a ripple of fiery pain exploded across his chest.
“Stop it—stop that,” cried Dmitriev. “
You will kill yourself.”
“You must free me!” Levin shouted, half mad with his need to fetch the doctor and return to Kitty’s side. He hurled his shoulder once more against the invisible bars that held him, and was thrown down onto the street writhing and clutching at himself.
“No . . . no . . . I beg of you to stop,” said Dmitriev with desperation, as Levin stumbled back to his feet.
“Let me free! Ahhh!”
He lunged again, and this time felt the shock in every synapse of his body, jolting up and down his spinal column, pooling at the base of his brain. Levin collapsed on the street, twitching and muttering like a madman. Dmitriev looked nervously around. “You cannot persist in this. Rearguard,” he insisted again. “Rearguard!”
“Kitty.”
Levin groaned, crawled to his feet. On all fours he limped into the barely perceptible bars like a wounded animal, shuddered with pain, and collapsed feebly in the street.
“I cannot let you die, Konstantin Levin,” the man from UnConSciya said at last. “You have a more important part to play. I cannot let you die.” He clicked the button on the box, and with a barely audible whoosh Levin’s invisible prison disappeared. He staggered toward the door of the doctor’s home.
“Only . . . only think of your country,” said the operative to Levin’s back, now pleading when only a moment ago he had been commanding.
Levin lifted his hand to pull on the makeshift bellpull that the doctor’s household had rigged in place of a Class I Doorchime.
“Konstantin Dmitritch! Do it for your Class III.”
Levin turned, and hissed, “What of him?”
“I am sorry to tell you this, but Socrates and Tatiana have been captured in Urgensky caught up in a mass purge of Class II robots. They are on the way here, even now, to be melted down with the others. Unless we can stop it . . . and we can stop it. You can.”
Levin, feverish with pain and the desperate need to return to his wife, shook his head rapidly, like a mad dog shakes off a plaguing flea, and rang the bell of the doctor’s house.
* * *
When Levin got home with the doctor, he had nearly pushed the encounter from his mind. He drove up at the same time as the princess, Kitty’s mother, 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.
From the moment when he had woken 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.
He thought at one moment during this unbearable hour of Socrates. There would be time, he told himself. There would be time to help him, to save him. Tomorrow . . . And his mind then passed over these thoughts, returning to what was before him: to Kitty, and to his child, teetering on the cusp of existence.
This was a time for humans.
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, which would squeeze his hand with extraordinary violence and then push it away—seemed to him hours, and hours seemed to him minutes. 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, rifling through some old medical manual, its pages yellowed from generations of disuse; 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.
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 when the alien terror had burst from Nikolai’s chest. But that had been grief—grief and terror—this was joy. Yet that grief and this joy were alike outside all the ordinary conditions of life; they were loopholes, 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.
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. 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 chatter 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 to 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, 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. 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?”
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 doorpost, 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. 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 u
tmost 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, uttering 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 faraway world in which he had been living for the last twenty-two hours, Levin felt himself all in an instant borne back to the everyday world, the New Russia he had set himself in opposition to, glorified though now by such a radiance of happiness that he could not bear it. The strained cords 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 the old princess, like a flickering display light, 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 the princess saying, as she slapped the baby’s back with a shaking hand.
Leo Tolstoy & Ben Winters Page 47
