________________________________________________
_ 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. _
Read next: Part Seven: Chapter 16
Read previous: Part Seven: Chapter 14
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