Anna Karenina (Dole)/Part Seven/Chapter 15
CHAPTER XV
He did not know whether it was late or early. The candles had already burned down. Dolly had just come into the library, and was proposing to the doctor to lie down. Levin had been sitting there listening to the doctor's story of the charlatanry of magnetizers, and looking at the ash at the end of his cigarette. It was one of the moments of rest, and he was oblivious. He had entirely forgotten what was taking place. He listened to the doctor, and followed him understandingly.
Suddenly was heard a cry unlike anything he had ever heard. This cry was so terrible that Levin did not even stir, but, holding his breath, he looked at the doctor with eyes full of questioning terror.
The doctor bent his head, as if to hear better, and smiled with an air of approbation. Levin had reached the point where nothing could surprise him; and he said inwardly, "Evidently that must be so; but why that cry?" He went back to the sick-room on tiptoe, passed round by Lizavyeta Petrovna and the princess, and stood in his place by the bedside. The cry had ceased, but evidently there was some change. What, he did not know, and did not care to know. But he saw it by the grave expression of Lizavyeta Petrovna's pale face. Her face was stern and pale, and just as resolute as ever, although her lower jaw trembled a little. Her eyes were kept steadily fixed on Kitty. Her flushed, tortured face, with the little tufts of hair clinging to it, was turned toward him, and her eyes sought his. She raised her hand and tried to take his. When once she had got hold of it, she tried with her moist hand to press it to her forehead.
"Don't go, don't go! I am not afraid," said she, quickly. "Mamma, take away my ear-rings; they annoy me. .... You are n't afraid? .... Lizavyeta Petrovna, quick, quick!"—She spoke rapidly, and tried to smile; but suddenly her face grew convulsed, and she pushed him away. "This is terrible! I shall die, I shall die! go! go!" Then came the same unearthly cry.
Levin seized his head in his hands, and rushed from the room.
"That is nothing; all is going well," said Dolly, following after him.
But, whatever they might say, he knew that now all was lost! Leaning his head against the lintel, he stood in the adjoining room and listened to screams and moaning—such sounds as he had never heard before, and he knew that what was making such animal-like noise was she who had once been Kitty. He had long ceased to care about the child. He now hated that child. He even went so far as not to wish for Kitty to live, provided only her horrible agonies might be ended.
"Doctor, what does that mean? My God!" he said, seizing the doctor's arm as he went in.
"It is the end," replied the doctor; and his face was so serious, as he said this, that Levin thought he meant that Kitty was dead.
Not knowing what would become of him, he went back to the bedroom.
What he first saw was Lizavyeta Petrovna's face; it was even more than before portentous and stern. It was no longer Kitty's face that was there; in the place where it had been before, there was something terrible both by reason of the agony which contracted it, and by reason of the sound that came from it. He bowed his head against the wooden frame of the bed, feeling that his heart would burst. The awful shriek still continued, it grew more piercing than ever, as if the last summit of horror had been reached. Then suddenly the shriek ceased. He could not believe it, but he could not doubt; and he heard a gentle rustling and a quick breathing, and his wife's living, loving, happy voice whispered, "Kanetchna—It is over!"
He raised his head. As she lay there, beautiful with a supernatural beauty, with her arms nervelessly resting on the counterpane, she looked at him, and tried to smile at him, but could not.
Coming suddenly out of that mysterious and terrible world where he had been living for twenty-two hours, Levin felt himself transported back into his ordinary every-day world of luminous happiness, and he could not bear it. The cords long tense snapped. He burst into tears; and the sobs of joy which he could not foresee shook his whole body so violently that he could not speak.
He knelt beside Kitty, and pressed his lips on her hand, and her gentle fingers answered his caress. And meantime, at the foot of the bed, in the skilful hands of Lizavyeta Petrovna, like the small, uncertain flame of a lamp, flickered the life of a human being, which just before had not been, and which with every right and every responsibility would live, and propagate its kind.
"He lives, he lives! Yes, it is a boy! Don't be worried," Levin heard Lizavyeta's voice saying, while with a trembling hand she slapped the little one's back.
"Mamma, is it true?" asked Kitty.
And the princess's sobs answered her.
And amid the silence, like an indubitable answer to the young mother's questions, was heard a voice, absolutely different from the subdued voices speaking in the room. It was the bold, decided, imperious, almost impertinent cry of the new human being, which had come whence no one knew.
Just before, if Levin had been told that Kitty was dead, that he himself had died with her, and that their children were angels, and that they were all in the presence of God, he would not have been surprised. And now that he had come back to reality, it took a prodigious effort of thought to comprehend that his wife was alive, that she was doing well, and that this desperately screeching creature was his son. Kitty was saved, her suffering was passed, and he was inexpressibly happy. That he could understand, and it made him happy; but the child! Whence? Why? What was it? .... He could not wont himself to the thought of it. It seemed to him somehow too much, too overwhelming; and it was long before he became accustomed to it.