Anna Karenina (Dole)/Part Eight/Chapter 18

by Leo Tolstoy

CHAPTER XVIII

In the course of all that day, during the most varied conversations in which Levin took part, as it were, only with the external side of his mind, and notwithstanding his disillusion at finding that the moral regeneration had not taken place in his nature after all, he did not cease to be pleasantly conscious that his heart was full.

After the shower, it was too wet to go out for a walk, and, moreover, other threatening clouds were piling up on the horizon, and here and there reaching up high into the sky, black, and laden with thunder. All the household spent the rest of the day within doors.

Discussions were avoided, and after dinner all were in the gayest frame of mind.

Katavasof at first kept the ladies laughing by his original turns of wit, which always pleased people when they made his acquaintance; then afterward being drawn out by Sergyeï Ivanovitch, he related his very interesting observations on the different characteristics and features of male and female flies, and their habits.

Sergyeï Ivanovitch also was very gay; and at tea he explained the future of the Eastern question so simply and well that all could follow him. Kitty alone did not hear him. She had been summoned to the nursery to give Mitya his bath.

A few moments after Kitty had left the room, Levin also was called to follow her.

Leaving his tea, and feeling regretful at having an interesting conversation interrupted, and at the same time troubled because they had called him to the nursery, a thing which had hitherto happened only in cases of emergency, Levin followed his wife.

In spite of the fact that he was greatly interested in his brother's partly outlined scheme of making the newly enfranchised world of forty millions of Slavs join with Russia in establishing a new epoch in history—for it was something entirely novel to him, in spite of his curiosity and anxiety at having been summoned to the nursery, as soon as he had left the drawing-room and was once more alone, he immediately remembered his thoughts of the morning. And all these theories as to the significance of the Slav element in the universal history seemed to him so insignificant in comparison with what was taking place in his own soul, that for a moment he forgot all about it, and returned to the moral state that had so delighted him at the beginning of the day.

This time he did not wholly retrace the course of thought which had led him to this state of mind, nor was it necessary. He was borne immediately back to that feeling which had guided him, which had been connected with those thoughts, and he now found the feeling stronger and more definite in his soul than ever before. Now there was no longer what had always marked his previous imaginary attempts at gaining spiritual calmness, when he had been obliged to call a halt to the whole course of his thoughts in order to find the feeling; now, on the contrary, the feeling of joy and calmness was more vivid than before, but thought did not overtake the feeling. He walked along the terrace, and saw two stars glowing in the already darkening sky, and suddenly he remembered a course of reasoning:—

"Yes," said he to himself, "as I looked at the heavens I thought that the vault which I gaze at is not a lie. But there was the something that remained half thought out in my mind,—something that I hid from myself. Now, what was it? There cannot be an answer. If one could think it out, all things would be explained."

Just as he entered the child's chamber, he remembered what it was that he hid from himself. It was this:—

"If the chief proof of the existence of God lies in the revelation of good, why should this revelation be limited to the Christian Church? How about those millions of Buddhists and Mohammedans, who are also seeking for the truth and doing right?"

It seemed to him that there must be an answer to this question, but he could not find and express it before entering the room.

Kitty, with her sleeves rolled up, was bending over the bath-tub, in which she was washing the baby. As she heard her husband's steps, she turned her face to him, and with a smile called him to her. With one hand she was supporting the head of the plump little fellow, who was floating on his back in the water and kicking with his legs; with the other she was squeezing the sponge on him.

"Come here! look, look!" said she, as her husband came up to , her. "Agafya Mikhaïlovna is right; he knows us."

The fact was that Mitya to-day for the first time gave indubitable proof that he knew his friends.

As soon as Levin went to the bath-tub, the experiment was tried, and it was wholly successful. A cook, who was called for the purpose, bent over the tub. The baby frowned and shook his head. Kitty bent over him, and he smiled radiantly, and clung with his little hands to the sponge and sucked with his lips, producing such a strange and contented sound that not only the mother and the nurse, but Levin himself, were enchanted.

They took the baby from the water, wiped him, and, after he had expressed his disapprobation with a piercing scream, they gave him to his mother.

"Well, I am very glad to see that you begin to love him," said Kitty, as she sat down in a comfortable seat, with the child at her breast. "I am very glad. It really troubled me when you said you had n't any feeling for him."

"No! did I say that I had no feeling for him? I only said that I was disappointed."

"How were you disappointed?"

"I was n't disappointed in him, but in the feeling that he would arouse. I expected more. I expected as a surprise some new and pleasant feeling; and instead of that, it was pity, disgust."

She listened to him as she put on her slender fingers the rings which she had taken off while bathing the baby.

"And more of fear and pity than of satisfaction. I never knew until to-day, after the storm, how I loved him."

Kitty smiled with radiant joy.

"Were you very much afraid?" she asked. "And so was I. But it seems more terrible to me now when the danger is all past. I shall go and look at the oak to-morrow. How nice Katavasof is! Well, the whole day has been so pleasant. You are so delightful with your brother when you want to be. .... Well, go to them. It is always hot and stifling here after the bath."