Chapter XV
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.