APDL Eductation Resources/APDL Eductation Resources.iso/text/authors/tolstoy/annakareni/ANNA_K_8

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                           XI.


"What a marvelous, sweet and unhappy woman!" he was thinking, as
he stepped out into the frosty air with Stepan Arkadyevich.

"Well, didn't I tell you?" said Stepan Arkadyevich, seeing that
Levin had been completely won over.

"Yes," said Levin pensively, "an extraordinary woman! It's not her
cleverness, but she has such wonderful depth of feeling. I'm awfully
sorry for her!"

"Now, please God everything will soon be settled. Well, well,
don't be hard on people in future," said Stepan Arkadyevich, opening
the carriage door. "Good-by; we don't go the same way."

Still thinking of Anna, of everything, even the simplest phrase in
their conversation with her, and recalling the minutest changes in her
expression, entering more and more into her position, and feeling
sympathy for her, Levin reached home.


At home Kouzma told Levin that Katerina Alexandrovna was quite well,
and that her sisters had just gone, and he handed him two letters.
Levin read them at once in the hall, that he might not overlook them
later. One was from Sokolov, his bailiff. Sokolov wrote that the wheat
could not be sold, that the price was only five and a half roubles,
and that he did not know where he had to get the money. The other
letter was from his sister. She scolded him for her business being
still unsettled.

"Well, we must sell it at five and a half if we can't get more,"
Levin decided on the spot the first question which had always before
seemed such a weighty one, with extraordinary facility. "It's
extraordinary how all one's time is taken up here," he thought,
considering the second letter. He felt himself to blame for not having
got done what his sister had asked him to do for her. "Today, again,
I've not been to court, but today I've certainly not had time." And
resolving that he would not fail to do it next day, he went up to
his wife. As he went in, Levin mentally ran rapidly through the day he
had spent. All the events of the day were conversations: conversations
he had heard and taken part in. All the conversations were upon
subjects which, if he had been alone in the country, he would never
have taken up, but here they were very interesting. And all these
conversations were right enough, only in two places there was
something not quite right. One was what he had said about the carp,
the other was something not quite the thing in the tender sympathy
he was feeling for Anna.

Levin found his wife low-spirited and dull. The dinner of the
three sisters had gone off very well, but then they had waited and
waited for him, all of them had felt dull, the sisters had departed,
and she had been left alone.

"Well, and what have you been doing?" she asked him, looking
straight into his eyes, which shone with rather a suspicious
brightness. But that she might not prevent his telling her everything,
she concealed her close scrutiny of him, and with an approving smile
listened to his account of how he had spent the evening.

"Well, I'm very glad I met Vronsky. I felt quite at ease and natural
with him. You understand, I shall try not to see him, but I'm glad
that this awkwardness is all over," he said, and remembering that,
by way of trying not to see him, he had immediately gone to call on
Anna, he blushed. "We talk about the peasants drinking; I don't know
who drinks most, the peasantry or our own class; the peasants do it on
holidays, but..."

But Kitty took not the slightest interest in discussing the drinking
habits of the peasants. She saw that he blushed, and she wanted to
know why.

"Well, and then where did you go?"

"Stiva urged me awfully to go and see Anna Arkadyevna."

And as he said this, Levin blushed even more, and his doubts as to
whether he had done right in going to see Anna were settled once for
all. He knew now that he ought not to have done so.

Kitty's eyes opened in a curious way and gleamed at Anna's name, but
controlling herself with an effort, she concealed her emotion and
deceived him.

"Oh!" was all she said.

"I'm sure you won't be angry at my going. Stiva begged me to, and
Dolly wished it," Levin went on.

"Oh, no!" she said, but he saw in her eyes a constraint that boded
him no good.

"She is a very sweet, a very, very unhappy, good woman," he said,
telling her about Anna, her occupations, and what she had told him
to say to her.

"Yes, of course, she is very much to be pitied," said Kitty, when he
had finished. "Whom was your letter from?"

He told her, and believing in her calm tone, he went to change his
coat.

Coming back, he found Kitty in the same easy chair. When he went
up to her, she glanced at him and broke into sobs.

"What? What is it?" he asked, knowing beforehand what.

"You're in love with that hateful woman; she has bewitched you! I
saw it in your eyes. Yes, yes! What can it all lead to? You were
drinking at the club, drinking and gambling, and then you went...
Where? No, we must go away... I shall go away tomorrow."

It was a long while before Levin could soothe his wife. At last he
succeeded in calming her, only by confessing that a feeling of pity,
in conjunction with the wine he had drunk, had been too much for
him; that he had succumbed to Anna's artful influence, and that he
would avoid her. One thing he did with more sincerity confess to was
that living so long in Moscow, a life of nothing but conversation,
eating and drinking, he was growing crazy. They talked till three
o'clock in the morning. Only at three o'clock were they sufficiently
reconciled to be able to go to sleep.

                           XII.


After taking leave of her guests, Anna did not sit down, but began
walking up and down the room. She had unconsciously the whole
evening done her utmost to arouse in Levin a feeling of love- as of
late she had fallen into doing with all young men- and she knew she
had attained her aim, as far as was possible in one evening, with a
married and conscientious man. She liked him very much indeed, and, in
spite of the striking difference, from the masculine point of view,
between Vronsky and Levin, as a woman she saw something they had in
common, which had made Kitty able to love both. Yet as soon as he
was out of the room, she ceased to think of him.

One thought, and one only, pursued her in different forms, and
refused to be shaken off. "If I have so much effect on others, on this
man, who loves his home and his wife, why is it he is so cold to
me?... Not cold exactly- he loves me, I know that! But something new
is drawing us apart now. Why wasn't he here all the evening? He told
Stiva to say he could not leave Iashvin, and must watch over his play.
Is Iashvin a child? But supposing it's true. He never tells a he.
But there's something else in it if it's true. He is glad of an
opportunity of showing me that he has other duties; I know that, I
submit to that. But why prove that to me? He wants to show me that his
love for me is not to interfere with his freedom. But I need no
proofs- I need love. He ought to understand all the bitterness of this
life for me here in Moscow. Is this life? I am not living, but waiting
for an event, which is continually put off and put off. No answer
again! And Stiva says he cannot go to Alexei Alexandrovich. And I
can't write again. I can do nothing, can begin nothing, can alter
nothing; I hold myself in, I wait, inventing amusements for myself-
the English family, writing, reading- but it's all nothing but a sham,
it's all the same as morphine. He ought to feel for me," she said,
feeling tears of self-pity coming into her eyes.

She heard Vronsky's abrupt ring and hurriedly dried her tears- not
only dried her tears, but sat down by a lamp and opened a book,
affecting composure. She wanted to show him that she was displeased
that he had not come home as he had promised- displeased only, and not
on any account to let him see her distress, and, least of all, her
self-pity. She might pity herself, but he must not pity her. She did
not want strife, she blamed him for wanting to quarrel, but
unconsciously put herself into an attitude of antagonism.

"Well, you've not been dull?" he said, eagerly and good-humoredly,
going up to her. "What a terrible passion it is- gambling!"

"No, I've not been dull; I've learned long ago not to be dull. Stiva
has been here, and Levin."

"Yes, they meant to come and see you. Well, how did you like Levin?"
he said, sitting down beside her.

"Very much. They have not been gone long. What was Iashvin doing?"

"He was winning- seventeen thousand. I got him away. He had really
started home, but he went back again, and now he's losing."

"Then what did you stay for?" she asked, suddenly lifting her eyes
to him. The expression of her face was cold and ungracious. "You
told Stiva you were staying on to get Iashvin away. And you have
left him there."

The same expression of cold readiness for the conflict appeared on
his face too.

"In the first place, I did not ask him to give you any message;
and secondly, I never tell lies. But the chief point is, I wanted to
stay, and I stayed," he said, frowning. "Anna, what is it for, why
will you do this?" he said after a moment's silence, bending over
toward her; and he opened his hand, hoping she would lay hers in it.

She was glad of this appeal for tenderness. But some strange force
of evil would not let her give herself up to her feelings, as though
the rules of warfare would not permit her to surrender.

"Of course you wanted to stay, and you stayed. You do everything you
want to. But what do you tell me that for? With what object?" she
said, getting more and more excited. "Does anyone contest your rights?
But you want to be right, and you're welcome to be right."

His hand closed, he turned away, and his face wore a still more
obstinate expression.

"For you it's a matter of obstinacy," she said, watching him
intently and suddenly finding the right word for that expression
that irritated her, "simply obstinacy. For you it's a question of
whether you keep the upper hand of me, while for me..." Again she felt
sorry for herself, and she almost burst into tears. "If you knew
what it is for me! When I feel as I do now, that you are hostile- yes,
hostile to me- if you knew what this means for me! If you knew how I
feel on the brink of calamity at this instant, how afraid I am of
myself!" And she turned away, hiding her sobs.

"But what are you talking about?" he said, horrified at her
expression of despair and again bending over her, he took her hand and
kissed it. "What is it for? Do I seek amusements outside our home?
Don't I avoid the society of women?"

"Well, yes! If that were all!" she said.

"Come, tell me what I ought to do to give you peace of mind? I am
ready to do anything to make you happy," he said, touched by her
expression of despair; "what wouldn't I do to save you from distress
of any sort, as now, Anna!" he said.

"It's nothing, nothing!" she said. "I don't know myself whether it's
the solitary life, my nerves... Come, don't let us talk of it. What
about the race? You haven't told me!" she inquired, trying to
conceal her triumph at the victory, which had been on her side after
all.

He asked for supper, and began telling her about the races; but in
his tone, in his eyes, which became more and more cold, she saw that
he did not forgive her for her victory, that the feeling of
obstinacy with which she had been struggling had asserted itself again
in him. He was colder to her than before, as though he were regretting
his surrender. And she, remembering the words that had given her the
victory, "how I feel on the brink of calamity, how afraid I am of
myself," saw that this weapon was a dangerous one, and that it could
not be used a second time. And she felt that beside the love that
bound them together there had grown up between them some evil spirit
of strife, which she could not exorcise from his heart, and still less
from her own.

                           XIII.


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 state in which he was that day- that
leading an aimless, irrational life, also living beyond his means,
after drinking to excess (he could not call what happened at the
club anything else), forming inappropriately friendly relations with a
man with whom his wife had once been in love, and after a still more
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 waked 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 meaning 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, 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 struggling between regret at waking him, and the
desire to talk to him.

"Kostia, don't be frightened. It's all right. But I fancy... We
ought to send for Lizaveta Petrovna."

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 away 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 artificial or pretended 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 unconsciously, seeking someone responsible for this
suffering for him to punish; but there was no one responsible. 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 Lizaveta Petrovna....
Kostia!... Never mind- it's over."

She moved away from him and rang the bell.

"Well, go now; Pasha's coming. I am all right."

And Levin saw with astonishment that she had taken up the knitting
she had brought in in the night, and had begun working at it again.

As Levin was going out of one door, he heard the maidservant come in
at the other. He stood at the door and heard Kitty giving exact
directions to the maid, and beginning to help her move the bedstead.

He dressed, and while they were putting in his horse, as there
were no hacks about as yet, he ran again up to the bedroom, not on
tiptoe, it seemed to him, but on wings. Two maidservants were
carefully shifting something about in the bedroom. Kitty was walking
about knitting rapidly and giving directions.

"I'm going for the doctor. They have sent for Lizaveta Petrovna, but
I'll go on there too. Isn't there anything wanted? Yes- shall I go
to Dolly's?"

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.

"Lord have mercy on us! Forgive us! Help us!" he repeated the
words that for some reason came suddenly to his lips. And he, an
unbeliever, repeated these words not with his lips only. At that
instant he knew that all his doubts, even the impossibility of
believing with his reason, of which he was aware in himself, did not
in the least hinder his turning to God. All of that now floated out of
his soul like dust. To whom was he to turn if not to Him in whose
hands he felt himself, his soul, and his love?

The horse was not yet ready, but feeling a peculiar concentration of
his physical forces and his intellect on what he had to do, he, losing
no minute, started off on foot without waiting for the horse, and told
Kouzma to overtake him.

At the corner he met a night hack driving hurriedly. In the little
sleigh, wrapped in a velvet cloak, sat Lizaveta Petrovna with a
kerchief round her head. "Thank God! thank God!" he said, overjoyed to
recognize her little fair face which wore a peculiarly serious, even
stern expression. Telling the driver not to stop, he ran along
beside her.

"For two hours, then? Not more?" she inquired. "You should let Piotr
Dmitrievich know, but don't hurry him. And get some opium at the
chemist's."

"So you think that it will go well? Lord have mercy on us and help
us!" Levin said, seeing his own horse driving out of the gate. Jumping
into the sleigh beside Kouzma, he told him to drive to the doctor's.

                           XIV.


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 seemed very busy about
them. This concentration of the footman upon his lamps, and his
indifference to what was passing in Levin, at first astounded him, but
immediately on considering the question he realized that no one knew
or was bound to know his feelings, and that it was all the more
necessary to act calmly, sensibly, and resolutely to get through
this wall of indifference and attain his aim. "Don't be in a hurry
or let anything slip," Levin said to himself, feeling a greater and
greater flow of physical energy and attention to all he had yet to do.

Having ascertained that the doctor was not getting up, Levin
considered various plans, and decided on the following one; that
Kouzma should go for another doctor, while he himself should go to the
chemist's for opium, and if, when he came back, the doctor had not yet
begun to get up, he would, either by tipping the footman, or by force,
wake the doctor at all hazards.

At the chemist's the lank pharmacist wafered a packet of powders for
a coachman who stood waiting, and refused him opium with the same
callousness with which the doctor's footman had cleaned his lamp
chimneys. Trying not to get flustered or out of temper, Levin
mentioned the names of the doctor and midwife, and explaining what the
opium was needed for, tried to persuade him. The assistant inquired in
German whether he should give it, and receiving an affirmative reply
from behind the partition, he took out a bottle and a funnel,
deliberately poured the opium from a bigger bottle into a little
one, stuck on a label, sealed it up, in spite of Levin's request
that he would not do so, and was about to wrap it up too. This was
more than Levin could stand; he took the bottle firmly out of his
hands, and ran to the big glass doors. The doctor was not even now
getting up, and the footman, busy now in putting down the rugs,
refused to wake him. Levin deliberately took out a ten-rouble note,
and careful to speak slowly, though losing no time over the
business, he handed him the note, and explained that Piotr Dmitrievich
(what a great and important personage he seemed to Levin now, this
Piotr Dmitrievich, who had been of so little consequence in his eyes
before) had promised to come at any time; that he would certainly
not be angry! And that he must therefore wake him at once.

The footman agreed, and went upstairs, taking Levin into the waiting
room.

Levin could hear through the door the doctor coughing, moving about,
washing, and saying something. Three minutes passed; it seemed to
Levin that more than an hour had gone by. He could not wait any
longer.

"Piotr Dmitrievich, Piotr Dmitrievich?" he said in an imploring
voice at the open door. "For God's sake, forgive me! See me as you
are. It's been going on more than two hours already."

"In a minute; in a minute!" answered a voice, and to his amazement
heard that the doctor was smiling as he spoke.

"For one instant!"...

"In a minute."

Two minutes more passed while the doctor was putting on his boots,
and two minutes more while the doctor put on his coat and combed his
hair.

"Piotr Dmitrievich!" Levin was beginning again in a plaintive voice,
just as the doctor came in, dressed and ready. "These people have no
conscience," thought Levin. "Combing his hair, while we're dying!"

"Good morning!" the doctor said to him, shaking hands, and, as it
were, teasing him with his composure. "There's no hurry. Well, now?"

Trying to be as accurate as possible, Levin began to tell him
every unnecessary detail of his wife's condition, interrupting his
account repeatedly with entreaties that the doctor would come with him
at once.

"Oh, you needn't be in any hurry. You don't understand, you know.
I'm certain I'm not wanted; still I've promised, and, if you like,
I'll come. But there's no hurry. Please sit down; won't you have
some coffee?"

Levin stared at him with eyes that asked whether he was laughing
at him; but the doctor had no notion of making fun of him.

"I know, I know," the doctor said, smiling; "I'm a married man
myself; and at these moments we husbands are very much to be pitied.
I've a patient whose husband always takes refuge in the stables on
such occasions."

"But what do you think, Piotr Dmitrievich? Do you suppose it will go
all right?"

"Everything points to a favorable issue."

"So you'll come immediately?" said Levin, looking wrathfully at
the servant who was bringing in the coffee.

"In just an hour."

"Oh, for God's sake!"

"Well, let me drink my coffee, anyway."

The doctor started upon his coffee. Both were silent.

"The Turks are really getting beaten, though. Did you read
yesterday's telegrams?" said the doctor, thoroughly masticating a
roll.

"No, I can't stand it!" said Levin, jumping up. "So you'll be with
us in a quarter of an hour?"

"In half an hour."

"On your honor?"

When Levin got home, he drove up at the same time as the Princess,
and they went up to the bedroom together. The Princess had tears in
her eyes, and her hands were shaking. Seeing Levin, she embraced
him, and burst into tears.

"Well, my dear Lizaveta Petrovna?" she queried, clasping the hand of
the midwife, who came out to meet them with a beaming and anxious
face.

"Everything is going on well," she said; "persuade her to lie
down. She will feel easier that way."

From the moment when he had waked up 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. Yet only one hour had passed.

But 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 situation 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 more
hours, 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, that would squeeze his hand with extraordinary
violence and then push it away- seemed to him hours, and hours
seemed to him minutes. He was surprised when Lizaveta Petrovna asked
him to light a candle behind a screen, and he found that it was five
o'clock in the afternoon. If he had been told it was only ten
o'clock in the morning he would not have been surprised. 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 thick cigarettes, and Lizaveta Petrovna with a firm,
resolute, reassuring face, 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. The Princess was with the doctor
in the bedroom, then in the study, where a table set for dinner
suddenly appeared; then she was not there, but Dolly was. Then Levin
remembered he had been sent somewhere. Once he had been sent to move a
table and sofa. He had done this eagerly, thinking it had to be done
for her sake, and only later on he found it was his own bed he had
been getting ready. Then he had been sent to the study to ask the
doctor something. The doctor had answered and then had said
something about the irregularities in the municipal council. Then he
had been sent to the bedroom to help the old Princess move the holy
image in its silver-gilt setting, and with the Princess's old
waiting maid he had clambered on a shelf to reach it and had broken
the lampad, and the old servant had tried to reassure him about the
lampad and about his wife, and he carried the holy image in and set it
at the head of Kitty's bed, carefully tucking the image in behind
the pillow. But where, when, and why all this had happened, he could
not tell. He did not understand why the old Princess took his hand,
and looking compassionately at him, begged him not to worry himself,
and Dolly persuaded him to eat something and led him out of the
room, and even the doctor looked seriously and with commiseration at
him, and offered him a drop of something.

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 at
the deathbed of his brother Nikolai. But that had been grief- 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.

"Lord, have mercy on us, and succor us!" he repeated to himself
incessantly, feeling, in spite of his long and, as it seemed, complete
alienation from religion, that he turned to God just as trustfully and
simply as he had in his childhood and first youth.

All this time he had two distinct moods. One was away from her, with
the doctor, who kept smoking one thick cigarette after another and
extinguishing them on the edge of a full ash tray; with Dolly, and
with the old Prince, where there was talk about dinner, about
politics, about Maria Petrovna's illness, and where Levin suddenly
forgot for a minute what was happening, and felt as though he had
waked up from sleep; the other mood was in her presence, at her
pillow, where his heart seemed breaking, and still did not break, from
sympathetic suffering, and he prayed to God without ceasing. And every
time he was brought back from a moment of oblivion by a scream
reaching him from the bedroom, he fell into the same strange terror
that had come upon him the first minute. Every time he heard a shriek,
he jumped up, ran to justify himself, remembered on the way that he
was not to blame, and he longed to defend her, to help her. But as
he looked at her, he saw again that help was impossible, and he was
filled with terror and prayed: "Lord, have mercy on us, and help
us!" And as time went on, both these moods became more intense; the
calmer he became away from her, completely forgetting her, the more
agonizing became both her sufferings and his feeling of helplessness
before them. He jumped up, would have liked to run away, but ran to
her.

Sometimes, when again and again she called upon him, he blamed
her; but seeing her submissive, smiling face, and hearing the words "I
am worrying you," he threw the blame on God; but thinking of God, at
once he fell beseeching God to forgive him and have mercy.

                           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? Soon, soon, 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 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 pray for her life now- all he longed for was the
cessation of this awful anguish.

"Doctor! What is it? What is it? My 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 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 old everyday world, though
glorified 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,
and 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 answer 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, which 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;
and 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.

                           XVI.


At ten o'clock the old Prince, Sergei Ivanovich, and Stepan
Arkadyevich, were sitting at Levin's. Having inquired after Kitty,
they had dropped into conversation upon other subjects. Levin heard
them, and unconsciously, as they talked, going over the past, over
what they had been up to that morning, he thought of himself as he had
been yesterday till that point. It was as though a hundred years had
passed since then. He felt himself exalted to unattainable heights,
from which he studiously lowered himself so as not to wound the people
he was talking to. He talked, and was all the time thinking of his
wife, of her present condition, of his son, in whose existence he
tried to school himself into believing. The whole world of woman,
which had taken for him since his marriage a new value he had never
suspected before, was now so exalted that his imagination could not
embrace it. He heard them talk of yesterday's dinner at the club,
and thought: "What is happening with her now? Is she asleep? How is
she? What is she thinking of? Is he crying- my son Dmitrii?" And in
the middle of the conversation, in the middle of a sentence, he jumped
up and went out of the room.

"Send me word if I can see her," said the Prince.

"Very well, in a minute," answered Levin, and without stopping, he
went to her room.

She was not asleep, she was talking gently with her mother, making
plans about the christening.

Carefully set to rights, with hair well brushed, in a smart little
cap with some blue in it, her arms out on the quilt, she was lying
on her back. Meeting his eyes, her eyes drew him to her. Her face,
bright before, brightened still more as he drew near her. There was
the same change in it from earthly to unearthly that is seen in the
face of the dead. But there it means farewell- here it meant
welcome. Again a rush of emotion, such as he had felt at the moment of
the child's birth, flooded his heart. She took his hand and asked
him if he had slept. He could not answer, and turned away, realizing
his weakness.

"I have had a nap, Kostia!" she said to him. "And I am so
comfortable now."

She looked at him, but suddenly her expression changed.

"Give him to me," she said, hearing the baby's cry. "Give him to me,
Lizaveta Petrovna, and he shall look at him."

"To be sure, his papa shall look at him," said Lizaveta Petrovna,
getting up and bringing something red, and queer and wriggling.
"Wait a minute, we'll array ourselves first," and Lizaveta Petrovna
laid the red wobbling thing on the bed, began untrussing and
trussing up the baby, lifting it up and turning it over with one
finger and powdering it with something.

Levin, looking at the tiny, pitiful creature, made strenuous efforts
to discover in his heart some traces of fatherly feeling for it. He
felt nothing toward it but disgust. But when it was undressed and he
caught a glimpse of wee, wee, little hands, little feet,
saffron-colored, with little toes, too; and even with a little big toe
different from the rest, and when he saw Lizaveta Petrovna closing the
wide-open little hands, as though they were soft springs, and
putting them into linen garments, such pity for the little creature
came upon him, and such terror that she would hurt it, that he held
her hand back.

Lizaveta Petrovna laughed.

"Don't be frightened, don't be frightened!"

When the baby had been arrayed and transformed into a solid doll,
Lizaveta Petrovna dandled it as though proud of her handiwork, and
stood a little away so that Levin might see his son in all his glory.

Kitty looked sideways in the same direction, never taking her eyes
off the baby. "Give him to me! Give him to me!" she said, and even
made as though she would sit up.

"What are you thinking of, Katerina Alexandrovna, you mustn't move
like that! Wait a minute. I'll give him to you. Here we're showing
papa what a fine fellow we are!"

And Lizaveta Petrovna, with one hand supporting the wobbling head,
lifted up on the other arm the strange, limp, red creature, whose head
was lost in its swaddling clothes. But it had a nose, too, and
slanting eyes, and smacking lips.

"A splendid baby!" said Lizaveta Petrovna.

Levin sighed with mortification. This splendid baby excited in him
no feeling but disgust and compassion. It was not at all the feeling
he had looked forward to.

He turned away while Lizaveta Petrovna put the baby to the
unaccustomed breast.

Suddenly laughter made him look round. The baby had taken the
breast.

"Come that's enough, that's enough!" said Lizaveta Petrovna, but
Kitty would not let the baby go. He fell asleep in her arms.

"Look, now," said Kitty, turning the baby so that he could see it.
The aged-looking little face suddenly puckered up still more, and
the baby sneezed.

Smiling, hardly able to restrain his tears, Levin kissed his wife
and went out of the dark room.

What he felt toward this little creature was utterly unlike what
he had expected. There was nothing cheerful and joyous in the feeling;
on the contrary, it was a new torture of apprehension. It was the
consciousness of a new sphere of liability to pain. And this sense was
so painful at first, the apprehension lest this helpless creature
should suffer was so intense, that it prevented him from noticing
the strange thrill of senseless joy and even pride that he had felt
when the baby had sneezed.

                           XVII.


Stepan Arkadyevich's affairs were in a very bad way.

The money for two-thirds of the forest had all been spent already,
and he had borrowed from the merchant in advance at ten per cent
discount almost all the remaining third. The merchant would not give
more, especially as Darya Alexandrovna, for the first time that winter
insisting on her right to her own property, had refused to sign the
receipt for the payment of the last third of the forest. All his
salary went on household expenses and in payment of petty debts that
could not be put off. There was positively no money.

This was unpleasant and awkward, and in Stepan Arkadyevich's opinion
things could not go on like this. The explanation of the position was,
in his view, to be found in the fact that his salary was too small.
The post he filled had been unmistakably very good five years ago, but
it was so no longer. Petrov, the bank director, had twelve thousand;
Sventitsky, a company director, had seventeen thousand; Mitin, who had
founded a bank, received fifty thousand. "Clearly I've been napping,
and they've overlooked me," Stepan Arkadyevich thought about
himself. And he began keeping his eyes and ears open, and toward the
end of the winter he had discovered a very good berth and had formed a
plan of attack upon it, at first from Moscow through aunts, uncles,
and friends, and then, when the matter was well advanced, in the
spring, he went himself to Peterburg. It was one of those berths (with
incomes ranging from one thousand to fifty thousand roubles), of which
there are so many more nowadays than there were snug, bribable ones in
the past. It was the post of secretary of the committee of the
amalgamated agency of the Southern Railways, and of certain banking
companies. This position, like all such appointments, called for
such immense energy and such varied qualifications, that it was
difficult for them to be found united in any one man. And since a
man combining all the qualifications was not to be found, it was at
least better that the post be filled by an honest than by a
dishonest man. And Stepan Arkadyevich was not merely an honest man,
unemphatically, in the common acceptation of the word; he was an
honest man, emphatically, in that special sense which the word has
in Moscow, when they talk of an "honest" politician, an "honest"
writer, an "honest" newspaper, an "honest" institution, an "honest"
tendency, meaning not simply that the man or the institution is not
dishonest, but that they are capable on occasion of stinging the
authorities. Stepan Arkadyevich moved in those circles in Moscow in
which that expression had come into use, was regarded there as an
honest man, and so had more right to this appointment than others.

The appointment yielded an income of from seven to ten thousand a
year, and Oblonsky could fill it without giving up his government
position. It was in the hands of two ministers, one lady, and two
Jews, and all these people, though the way had been paved already with
them, Stepan Arkadyevich had to see in Peterburg. Besides this
business, Stepan Arkadyevich had promised his sister Anna to obtain
from Karenin a definite answer on the question of divorce. And begging
fifty roubles from Dolly, he set off for Peterburg.

Stepan Arkadyevich sat in Karenin's study listening to his report on
the causes of the unsatisfactory position of Russian finance, and only
waiting for the moment when he would finish to speak about his own
business or about Anna.

"Yes, that's very true," he said, when Alexei Alexandrovich took off
the pince-nez, without which he could not read now, and looked
inquiringly at his quondam brother-in-law, "that's very true in
particular cases, but still, the principle of our day is freedom."

"Yes, but I lay down another principle, embracing the principle of
freedom," said Alexei Alexandrovich, with emphasis on the word
"embracing", and he put on his pince-nez again, so as to read the
passage in which this statement was made.

And turning over the beautifully written, wide-margined
manuscript, Alexei Alexandrovich read aloud the conclusive passage
once more.

"I don't advocate protection for the sake of private interest, but
for the public weal- and for the lower and upper classes equally,"
he said, looking over his pince-nez at Oblonsky. "But they cannot
grasp that, they are taken up now with personal interests, and carried
away by phrases."

Stepan Arkadyevich knew that when Karenin began to talk of what they
were doing and thinking, the persons who would not accept his report
and were the cause of everything wrong in Russia, that it was coming
near the end. And so now he eagerly abandoned the principle of free
trade, and fully agreed. Alexei Alexandrovich paused, thoughtfully
turning over the pages of his manuscript.

"Oh, by the way," said Stepan Arkadyevich, "I wanted to ask you,
some time when you see Pomorsky, to drop him a hint that I should be
very glad to get that new appointment of member of the committee of
the amalgamated agency of the Southern Railways and banking
companies." Stepan Arkadyevich was familiar by now with the title of
the post he coveted, and he brought it out rapidly without mistake.

Alexei Alexandrovich questioned him as to the duties of this new
committee, and pondered. He was considering whether the new
committee would not be acting in some way contrary to the views he had
been advocating. But as the influence of the new committee was of a
very complex nature, and his views were of very wide application, he
could not decide this straight off, and taking off his pince-nez, he
said:

"Of course, I can mention it to him; but what is your reason
precisely for wishing to obtain the appointment?"

"It's a good salary, rising to nine thousand, and my means..."

"Nine thousand!" repeated Alexei Alexandrovich, and he frowned.

The high figure of the salary made him reflect that on that side
Stepan Arkadyevich's proposed position ran counter to the main
tendency of his own projects of reform, which always leaned toward
economy.

"I consider, and I have embodied my views in a note on the
subject, that in our day these immense salaries are evidence of the
unsound economic assiette of our finances."

"But what's to be done?" said Stepan Arkadyevich. "Suppose a bank
director gets ten thousand- well, he's worth it; or an engineer gets
twenty thousand- after all, it's a growing thing, you know!"

"I assume that a salary is the price paid for a commodity, and it
ought to conform with the law of supply and demand. If the salary is
fixed without any regard for that law, as, for instance, when I see
two engineers leaving college together, both equally well trained
and efficient, and one getting forty thousand while the other is
satisfied with two; or when I see lawyers and hussars, having no
special qualifications, appointed directors of banking companies
with immense salaries, I conclude that the salary is not fixed in
accordance with the law of supply and demand, but simply through
personal interest. And this is an abuse of great gravity in itself,
and one that reacts injuriously on the government service. I
consider..."

Stepan Arkadyevich made haste to interrupt his brother-in-law.

"Yes; but you must agree that the new institution being started is
of undoubted utility. After all, you know, it's a growing thing!
What they lay particular stress on is the thing being carried on
honestly," said Stepan Arkadyevich with emphasis.

But the Moscow significance of the word honest was lost on Alexei
Alexandrovich.

"Honesty is only a negative qualification," he said.

"Well, you'll do me a great service, anyway," said Stepan
Arkadyevich, "by putting in a word to Pomorsky- just in the way of
conversation..."

"But I fancy it depends more on Bolgarinov," said Alexei
Alexandrovich.

"Bolgarinov has fully assented, as far as he's concerned," said
Stepan Arkadyevich, turning red. Stepan Arkadyevich reddened at the
mention of that name, because he had been that morning at the Jew
Bolgarinov's, and the visit had left an unpleasant recollection.

Stepan Arkadyevich believed most positively that the committee in
which he was trying to get an appointment was a new, genuine, and
honest public body, but that morning when Bolgarinov had-
intentionally, beyond a doubt- kept him two hours waiting with other
petitioners in his waiting room, he had suddenly felt uneasy.

Whether he was uncomfortable because he, a descendant of Rurik,
Prince Oblonsky, had been kept for two hours waiting to see a Jew,
or that for the first time in his fife he was not following the
example of his ancestors in serving the government, but was turning
off into a new career- at any rate he was very uncomfortable. During
those two hours in Bolgarinov's waiting room Stepan Arkadyevich,
stepping jauntily about the room, pulling his side whiskers,
entering into conversation with the other petitioners, and inventing a
calembour dealing with his wait in the Jew's anteroom, assiduously
concealed from others, and even from himself, the feeling he was
experiencing.

But all the time he was uncomfortable and perturbed, he could not
have said why- whether because he could not get his calembour just
right, or from some other reason. When at last Bolgarinov had received
him with exaggerated politeness and unmistakable triumph at his
humiliation, and had all but refused the favor asked of him, Stepan
Arkadyevich had made haste to forget it all as soon as possible. And
now, at the mere recollection, he blushed.

                           XVIII.


"Now there is something I want to talk about, and you know what it
is... about Anna," Stepan Arkadyevich said, pausing for a brief space,
and shaking off the unpleasant impression.

As soon as Oblonsky uttered Anna's name, the face of Alexei
Alexandrovich became completely transformed; all the life went out
of it, and it looked weary and dead.

"What is it exactly that you want from me?" he said, moving in his
chair and snapping his pince-nez.

"A definite settlement, Alexei Alexandrovich- some settlement of the
situation. I'm appealing to you" ("not as to an injured husband,"
Stepan Arkadyevich was going to say, but, afraid of wrecking his
negotiation by this, he changed the words) "not as to a statesman"
(which did not sound apropos), "but simply as to a man, and a
goodhearted man, and a Christian. You must have pity on her," he said.

"That is, in what way, precisely?" Karenin said softly.

"Yes, pity on her. If you had seen her as I have!- I have been
spending all the winter with her- you would have pity on her. Her
position is awful, simply awful!"

"I had imagined," answered Alexei Alexandrovich in a higher,
almost shrill voice, "that Anna Arkadyevna had everything she had
desired for herself."

"Oh, Alexei Alexandrovich, for God's sake, let's not indulge in
recriminations! What is past is past, and you know what she wants
and is waiting for- a divorce."

"But I believe Anna Arkadyevna refuses a divorce, if I make it a
condition to leave me my son. I replied in that sense, and supposed
that the matter was ended. I consider it at an end," shrieked Alexei
Alexandrovich.

"But, for heaven's sake, don't get excited!" said Stepan
Arkadyevich, touching his brother-in-law's knee. "The matter is not
ended. If you will allow me to recapitulate, it was like this: when
you parted, you were as magnanimous as could possibly be; you were
ready to give her everything- freedom, even divorce. She appreciated
that. No, make no doubt. She did appreciate it- to such a degree that,
at the first moment, feeling how she had wronged you, she did not
consider and could not consider everything. She gave up everything.
But experience, time, have shown that her position is unbearable,
impossible."

"The life of Anna Arkadyevna can have no interest for me," Alexei
Alexandrovich put in, raising his eyebrows.

"Allow me to disbelieve that," Stepan Arkadyevich replied gently.
"Her position is intolerable for her, and of no benefit to anyone
whatever. She has deserved it, you will say. She knows that and asks
you for nothing; she says plainly that she dare not ask you. But I,
all of us- her relatives, all who love her- beg you, entreat you.
Why should she suffer? Who is any the better for it?"

"Excuse me, you seem to put me in the position of the guilty party,"
observed Alexei Alexandrovich.

"Oh, no, oh, no, not at all! Please understand me," said Stepan
Arkadyevich again touching him- this time his hand- as though
feeling sure this physical contact would soften his brother-in-law.
"All I say is this: her position is intolerable, and it might be
alleviated by you, and you will lose nothing by it. I will arrange
it all for you, so that you'll never notice it. You did promise it,
you know."

"The promise was given before. And I had supposed that the
question of my son had settled the matter. Besides, I hoped that
Anna Arkadyevna had enough magnanimity..." Alexei Alexandrovich
articulated with difficulty, his lips twitching and his face white.

"She leaves it all to your magnanimity. She begs, she implores one
thing of you- to extricate her from the impossible position in which
she is placed. She does not ask for her son now. Alexei Alexandrovich,
you are a good man. Put yourself in her position for a minute. The
question of divorce for her in her position is a question of life
and death. If you had not promised it once, she would have
reconciled herself to her position, she would have gone on living in
the country. But you promised it, and she wrote to you, and moved to
Moscow. And here she's been for six months in Moscow, where every
chance meeting cuts her to the heart, every day expecting an answer.
Why, it's like keeping a condemned criminal for six months with the
rope round his neck, promising him perhaps death, perhaps mercy.
Have pity on her, and I will undertake to arrange everything.... Vos
scrupules..."

"I am not talking about that, about that..." Alexei Alexandrovich
interrupted with disgust. "But, perhaps, I promised what I had no
right to promise."

"So you go back on your promise?"

"I have never refused to do all that is possible, but I want time to
consider how much of what I promised is possible."

"No, Alexei Alexandrovich!" cried Oblonsky, jumping up. "I won't
believe that! She's unhappy as only a woman can be unhappy, and you
cannot refuse in such..."

"As much of what I promised as is possible. Vous professez d'etre
libre penseur. But I, as a believer, cannot, in a matter of such
gravity, act in opposition to the Christian law."

"But in Christian societies and among us, as far as I'm aware,
divorce is allowed," said Stepan Arkadyevich. "Divorce is sanctioned
even by our church. And we see..."

"It is allowed, but not in the sense..."

"Alexei Alexandrovich, you are not like yourself," said Oblonsky,
after a brief pause. "Wasn't it you (and didn't we all appreciate it
in you?) who forgave everything, and, moved simply by Christian
feeling, were ready to make any sacrifice? You said yourself: if a man
take thy cloak, give him thy coat also, and now..."

"I beg," said Alexei Alexandrovich shrilly, getting suddenly onto
his feet, his face white and his jaws twitching, "I beg you to drop
this... to drop... this subject!"

"Oh, no! Oh, forgive me, forgive me if I have wounded you," said
Stepan Arkadyevich, holding out his hand with a smile of
embarrassment; "but like a messenger I have simply performed the
commission given me."

Alexei Alexandrovich gave him his hand, pondered a little, and said:

"I must think it over and seek for guidance. The day after
tomorrow I will give you a final answer," he said, after considering a
moment.

                           XIX.


Stepan Arkadyevich was about to go away when Kornei came in to
announce:

"Sergei Alexeevich!"

"Who's Sergei Alexeevich?" Stepan Arkadyevich was about to ask,
but he remembered immediately.

"Ah, Seriozha!" he said aloud.- "'Sergei Alexeevich!' I thought it
was the director of some department.- Anna asked me to see him too,"
he remembered.

And he recalled the timid, piteous expression with which Anna had
said to him at parting: "Anyway, you will see him. Find out exactly
where he is, who is looking after him. And Stiva... If it were
possible! Could it be possible?" Stepan Arkadyevich knew what was
meant by that "if it were possible,"- if it were possible to arrange
the divorce so as to let her have her son.... Stepan Arkadyevich saw
now that it was useless to dream of that, but still he was glad to see
his nephew.

Alexei Alexandrovich reminded his brother-in-law that they never
spoke to the boy of his mother, and he begged him not to mention a
single word about her.

"He was very ill after that interview with his mother, which we
had not foreseen," said Alexei Alexandrovich. "Indeed, we feared for
his life. But with rational treatment, and sea bathing in the
summer, he regained his strength, and now, by the doctor's advice, I
have let him go to school. And certainly the companionship at school
has had a good effect on him, and he is perfectly well, and making
good progress."

"What a fine fellow he's grown! And he's no longer Seriozha, but
quite full-fledged- Sergei Alexeevich!" said Stepan Arkadyevich,
smiling, as he looked at the handsome, broad-shouldered lad in blue
jacket and long trousers, who walked in alertly and confidently. The
boy looked healthy and good-humored. He bowed to his uncle as to a
stranger, but, recognizing him, he blushed and turned hurriedly away
from him, as though offended and irritated at something. The boy
went up to his father and handed him a note of the marks he had gained
in school.

"Well, that's very fair," said his father, "you may go."

"He's thinner and taller, and has grown from a child into a boy; I
like that," said Stepan Arkadyevich. "Do you remember me?"

The boy looked back quickly at his uncle.

"Yes, mon oncle," he answered, glancing at his father, and again
he looked downcast.

His uncle called him to him, and took his hand.

"Well, and how are you getting on?" he said, wanting to talk to him,
and not knowing what to say.

The boy, blushing and making no answer, cautiously drew his hand
away. As soon as Stepan Arkadyevich let go his hand, he glanced
doubtfully at his father, and, like a bird set free, he darted out
of the room.

A year had passed since the last time Seriozha had seen his
mother. Since then he had heard nothing more of her. And in the course
of that year he had gone to school, and made friends among his
schoolfellows. The dreams and memories of his mother, which had made
him ill after seeing her, did not occupy his thoughts now. When they
came back to him, he studiously drove them away, regarding them as
shameful and girlish, below the dignity of a boy and a schoolboy. He
knew that his father and mother were separated by some quarrel, he
knew that he had to remain with his father, and he tried to get used
to that idea.

He disliked seeing his uncle, so like his mother, for it called up
those memories which he was ashamed of. He disliked it all the more
as, from certain words he had caught as he waited at the study door,
and still more from the faces of his father and uncle, he had
guessed that they must have been talking of his mother. And to avoid
condemning the father with whom he lived and on whom he was dependent,
and, above all, to avoid giving way to sentimentality, which he
considered so degrading, Seriozha tried not to look at his uncle,
who had come to disturb his peace of mind, and not to think of what he
recalled to him.

But when Stepan Arkadyevich, going out after him, saw him on the
stairs, and, calling to him, asked him how he spent his playtime at
school, Seriozha talked more freely to him away from his father's
presence.

"We have a railway now," he said in answer to his uncle's
question. "It's like this, you see: two sit on a bench- they're the
passengers; and one stands up straight on the bench. And all are
harnessed to it by their arms or by their belts, and they run
through all the rooms- the doors are left open beforehand. Well, and
it's pretty hard work being the conductor!"

"That's the one that stands?" Stepan Arkadyevich inquired, smiling.

"Yes, you want pluck for it, and cleverness too, especially when
they stop all of a sudden, or someone falls down."

"Yes, that must be a serious matter," said Stepan Arkadyevich,
watching with mournful interest the eager eyes, like his mother's; not
childish now- no longer fully innocent. And though he had promised
Alexei Alexandrovich not to speak of Anna, he could not restrain
himself.

"Do you remember your mother?" he asked suddenly.

"No, I don't," Seriozha said quickly. He blushed crimson, his eyes
drooping. And his uncle could get nothing more out of him.

His Slavic tutor found his pupil on the staircase half an hour
later, and for a long while he could not make out whether he was
ill-tempered or crying.

"What is it? I expect you hurt yourself when you fell down?" said
the tutor. "I told you it was a dangerous game. And we shall have to
speak to the director."

"If I had hurt myself, nobody should have found it out, that's
certain."

"Well, what is it, then?"

"Leave me alone! If I remember, or if I don't remember?... What
business is it of his? Why should I remember? Leave me in peace!" he
said, addressing not his tutor, but the whole world.

                           XX.


Stepan Arkadyevich, as usual, did not waste his time in Peterburg.
In Peterburg, besides business, his sister's divorce, and his
coveted appointment, he wanted, as he always did, to freshen himself
up, as he said, after the mustiness of Moscow.

In spite of its cafes chantants and its omnibuses, Moscow was yet
a stagnant bog. Stepan Arkadyevich always felt it. After living for
some time in Moscow, especially in close relations with his family, he
was conscious of a depression of spirits. After being a long time in
Moscow without a change, he reached a point when he positively began
to be worrying himself over his wife's ill-humor and reproaches,
over his children's health and education, and the petty details of his
official work; even the fact of being in debt worried him. But he
had only to go and stay a little while in Peterburg, in the circle
in which he moved there, where people lived- really lived- instead
of vegetating as in Moscow, and all such ideas vanished and melted
away at once, like wax before the fire.

A wife?... Only that day he had been talking to Prince Chechensky.
Prince Chechensky had a wife and family, grown-up children in the
Corps of Pages.... And he had another illegitimate family of
children also. Though the first family was very fine too, Prince
Chechensky felt happier in his second family; and he used to take
his eldest son with him to his second family, and told Stepan
Arkadyevich that he thought it good for his son, enlarging his
ideas. What would have been said to that in Moscow?

Children?... In Peterburg children did not prevent their parents
from enjoying life. The children were brought up in schools, and there
was no trace of the wild idea that prevailed in Moscow, in Lvov's
household, for instance, that all the luxuries of life were for the
children, while the parents have nothing but work and anxiety. Here
people understood that a man is in duty bound to live for himself,
as every man of culture should live.

Official duties?... Official work here was not the stiff, hopeless
drudgery that it was in Moscow. Here there was some interest in
official life. A chance meeting, a service rendered, a happy phrase, a
knack of facetious mimicry, and a man's career might be made in a
trice. So it had been with Briantsev, whom Stepan Arkadyevich had
met the previous day, and who was one of the highest functionaries
in government now. There was some interest in official work like that.

The Peterburg attitude on pecuniary matters had an especially
soothing effect on Stepan Arkadyevich. Bartniansky, who must spend
at least fifty thousand to judge by the style he lived in, had made
a remarkable comment the day before on that subject.

As they were talking before dinner, Stepan Arkadyevich said to
Bartniansky:

"You're friendly, I fancy, with Mordvinsky; you might do me a favor:
say a word to him, please, for me. There's an appointment I should
like to get- member of the agency..."

"Oh, I shan't remember all that, if you tell it to me.... But what
possesses you to have to do with railways and Yids?... Take it as
you will, it's a low business."

Stepan Arkadyevich did not say to Bartniansky that it was a "growing
thing"- Bartniansky would not have understood that.

"I want the money- I've nothing to live on."

"You're living, aren't you?"

"Yes, but in debt."

"Are you, though? Heavily?" said Bartniansky sympathetically.

"Very heavily: twenty thousand."

Bartniansky broke into good-humored laughter.

"Oh, lucky fellow!" said he. "My debts mount up to a million and a
half, and I've nothing, and still I can live, as you see!"

And Stepan Arkadyevich saw the correctness of this view not in words
only but in actual fact. Zhivakhov owed three hundred thousand, and
hadn't a copper to bless himself with, and he lived, and in style too!
Count Krivtsov was considered a hopeless case by everyone, and yet
he kept two mistresses. Petrovsky had run through five millions, and
still lived in just the same style, and was even a manager in the
financial department with a salary of twenty thousand. But besides
this, Peterburg had physically an agreeable effect on Stepan
Arkadyevich. It made him younger. In Moscow he sometimes found a
gray hair in his head, dropped asleep after dinner, stretched,
walked slowly upstairs, breathing heavily, was bored by the society of
young women, and did not dance at balls. In Peterburg he always felt
ten years younger.

His experience in Peterburg was exactly what had been described to
him on the previous day by Prince Piotr Oblonsky, a man of sixty,
who had just come back from abroad:

"We don't know how to live here," said Piotr Oblonsky. "I spent
the summer in Baden, and you wouldn't believe it, I felt quite a young
man. At a glimpse of a pretty woman, my thoughts... One dines and
drinks a glass of wine, and feels strong and ready for anything. I
came home to Russia- had to see my wife, and, what's more, go to my
country place; and there, you'd hardly believe it, in a fortnight
I'd got into a dressing gown and given up dressing for dinner. Needn't
say I had no thoughts left for pretty women. I became quite an old
gentleman. There was nothing left for me but to think of my eternal
salvation. I went off to Paris- I was at once as right as could be."

Stepan Arkadyevich felt exactly the difference that Piotr Oblonsky
described. In Moscow he degenerated so much that if he had had to be
there for long together, he might in good earnest have come to
considering his salvation; in Peterburg he felt himself a man of the
world again.

Between Princess Betsy Tverskaia and Stepan Arkadyevich there had
long existed rather curious relations. Stepan Arkadyevich always
flirted with her in jest, and used to say to her, also in jest, the
most unseemly things, knowing that nothing delighted her so much.
The day after his conversation with Karenin, Stepan Arkadyevich went
to see her, and felt so youthful that in this jesting flirtation and
nonsense he recklessly went so far that he did not know how to
extricate himself, as unluckily he was so far from being attracted
by her that he thought her positively disagreeable. What made it
hard to change the conversation was the fact that he was very
attractive to her. So that he was considerably relieved at the arrival
of Princess Miaghkaia, which cut short their tete-a-tete.

"Ah, so you're here!" said she when she saw him. "Well, and what
news of your poor sister? You needn't look at me like that," she
added. "Ever since they've all turned against her, all those who're
a thousand times worse than she, I've thought she did a very fine
thing. I can't forgive Vronsky for not letting me know when she was in
Peterburg. I'd have gone to see her and gone about with her
everywhere. Please give her my love. Come, tell me about her."

"Yes, her position is very difficult; she..." began Stepan
Arkadyevich, in the simplicity of his heart accepting as sterling coin
Princess Miaghkaia's words: "Tell me about her." Princess Miaghkaia
interrupted him immediately, as she always did, and began talking
herself.

"She's done what they all do, except me- only the others hide it.
But she wouldn't be deceitful, and she did a fine thing. And she did
better still in throwing up that crazy brother-in-law of yours. You
must excuse me. Everybody used to say he was so clever, so very
clever; I was the only one that said he was a fool. Now that he's so
thick with Lidia Ivanovna and Landau, they all say he's crazy, and I
should prefer not to agree with everybody, but this time I can't
help it."

"Oh, do please explain," said Stepan Arkadyevich; "what does it
mean? Yesterday I was seeing him on my sister's behalf, and I asked
him to give me a final answer. He gave me no answer, and said he would
think it over. But this morning, instead of an answer, I received an
invitation from Countess Lidia Ivanovna for this evening."

"Ah, so that's it, that's it!" said Princess Miaghkaia gleefully,
"they're going to ask Landau what he's to say."

"Ask Landau? What for? Who or what's Landau?"

"What! you don't know Jules Landau, le fameux Jules Landau, le
clairvoyant? He's crazy too, but on him your sister's fate depends.
See what comes of living in the provinces- you know nothing about
anything. Landau, do you see, was a commis in a shop in Paris, and
he went to a doctor's; and in the doctor's waiting room he fell
asleep, and in his sleep he began giving advice to all the patients.
And wonderful advice it was! Then the wife of Iury Meledinsky- you
know, the invalid?- heard of this Landau, and had him to see her
husband. And he cures her husband, though I can't say that I see he
did him much good, for he's just as feeble a creature as ever he
was, but they believed in him, and took him along with them, and
brought him to Russia. Here there's been a general rush to him, and
he's begun doctoring everyone. He cured Countess Bezzubova, and she
took such a fancy to him that she adopted him."

"Adopted him?"

"Yes, as her son. He's not Landau any more now, but Count
Bezzubov. That's neither here nor there, though; but Lidia- I'm very
fond of her, but she has a screw loose somewhere- has lost her heart
to this Landau now, and nothing is settled now in her house or
Alexei Alexandrovich's without him, and so your sister's fate is now
in the hands of Landau, alias Count Bezzubov."

                           XXI.


After a capital dinner and a great deal of cognac drunk at
Bartniansky's, Stepan Arkadyevich, only a little later than the
appointed time, went in to Countess Lidia Ivanovna's.

"Who else is with the countess? A Frenchman?" Stepan Arkadyevich
asked the hall porter, as he glanced at the familiar overcoat of
Alexei Alexandrovich and a queer, rather naive-looking overcoat with
clasps.

"Alexei Alexandrovich Karenin and Count Bezzubov," the porter
answered austerely.

"Princess Miaghkaia guessed right," thought Stepan Arkadyevich, as
he went upstairs. "Curious! It would be quite as well, though, to
get on friendly terms with her. She has immense influence. If she
would say a word to Pomorsky, the thing would be a certainty."

It was still quite light out-of-doors, but in Countess Lidia
Ivanovna's little drawing room the blinds were drawn and the lamps
lighted.

At a round table under a lamp sat the Countess and Alexei
Alexandrovich, talking softly. A short, thinnish man, very pale and
handsome, with feminine hips and knock-kneed legs, with fine brilliant
eyes and long hair lying on the collar of his coat, was standing at
the other end of the room gazing at the portraits on the wall. After
greeting the lady of the house and Alexei Alexandrovich, Stepan
Arkadyevich could not resist glancing once more at the unknown man.

"Monsieur Landau!" the Countess addressed him with a suavity and
circumspection that impressed Oblonsky. And she introduced them.

Landau looked round hurriedly, came up, and, smiling, laid his
moist, lifeless hand in Stepan Arkadyevich's outstretched hand and
immediately walked away, and fell to gazing at the portraits again.
The Countess and Alexei Alexandrovich looked at each other
significantly.

"I am very glad to see you, particularly today," said Countess Lidia
Ivanovna, pointing out to Stepan Arkadyevich a seat beside Karenin.

"I introduced you to him as Landau," she said in a soft voice,
glancing at the Frenchman and again immediately after at Alexei
Alexandrovich, "but he is really Count Bezzubov, as you're probably
aware. Only he does not like the title."

"Yes, I heard so," answered Stepan Arkadyevich; "they say he
completely cured Countess Bezzubova."

"She was here today, poor thing!" the Countess said, turning to
Alexei Alexandrovich. "This separation is awful for her. It's such a
blow to her!"

"And he positively is going?" queried Alexei Alexandrovich.

"Yes, he's going to Paris. He heard a voice yesterday," said
Countess Lidia Ivanovna, looking at Stepan Arkadyevich.

"Ah, a voice!" repeated Oblonsky, feeling that he must be as
circumspect as he possibly could in this society, where something
peculiar was happening, or was about to happen, to which he had not
the key.

A moment's silence followed, after which Countess Lidia Ivanovna, as
though approaching the main topic of conversation, said with a fine
smile to Oblonsky:

"I've known you for a long while, and am very glad to make a
closer acquaintance with you. Les amis de nos amis sont nos amis.
But to be a true friend, one must enter into the spiritual state of
one's friend, and I fear that you are not doing so in the case of
Alexei Alexandrovich. You understand what I mean?" she said, lifting
her fine pensive eyes.

"In part, Countess, I understand the position of Alexei
Alexandrovich..." said Oblonsky. Having no clear idea what they were
talking about, he wanted to confine himself to generalities.

"The change is not in his external position," Countess Lidia
Ivanovna said sternly, following with eyes of love the figure of
Alexei Alexandrovich as he got up and crossed over to Landau; "his
heart is changed, a new heart has been vouchsafed him, and I fear
you don't fully apprehend the change that has taken place in him."

"Oh, well, in general outlines I can conceive the change. We have
always been friendly, and now..." said Stepan Arkadyevich,
responding with a sympathetic glance to the expression of the
Countess, and mentally balancing the question with which of the two
ministers she was more intimate, so as to know which to have her speak
to.

"The change that has taken place in him cannot lessen his love for
his neighbors; on the contrary, that change can only intensify love in
his heart. But I am afraid you do not understand me. Won't you have
some tea?" she said, with her eyes indicating the footman, who was
handing round tea on a tray.

"Not quite, Countess. Of course, his misfortune..."

"Yes, a misfortune which has proved the highest happiness, when
his heart was made new, was filled to the full with it," she said,
gazing with eyes full of love at Stepan Arkadyevich.

"I do believe I might ask her to speak to both of them," thought
Stepan Arkadyevich.

"Oh, of course, Countess," he said; "but I imagine such changes
are a matter so private that no one, even the most intimate friend,
would care to speak of them."

"On the contrary! We ought to speak freely and help one another."

"Yes, undoubtedly so, but there is such a difference of convictions,
and besides..." said Oblonsky with a soft smile.

"There can be no difference where it is a question of holy truth."

"Oh, no, of course; but..." and Stepan Arkadyevich paused in
confusion. He understood at last that they were talking of religion.

"I fancy he will go into a trance immediately," said Alexei
Alexandrovich in a whisper full of meaning, going up to Lidia
Ivanovna.

Stepan Arkadyevich looked round. Landau was sitting at the window,
leaning on his elbow and the back of his chair, his head drooping.
Noticing that all eyes were turned on him, he raised his head and
smiled a smile of childlike artlessness.

"Don't take any notice," said Lidia Ivanovna, and she lightly
moved a chair up for Alexei Alexandrovich. "I have observed..." she
was beginning, when a footman came into the room with a letter.
Lidia Ivanovna rapidly ran her eyes over the note, and, excusing
herself, wrote an answer with extraordinary rapidity, handed it to the
man, and came back to the table. "I have observed," she went on, "that
Moscow people, especially the men, are more than all others
indifferent to religion."

"Oh, no, Countess, I thought Moscow people had the reputation of
being the firmest in the faith," answered Stepan Arkadyevich.

"But as far as I can make out, you are unfortunately one of the
indifferent ones," said Alexei Alexandrovich, turning to him with a
weary smile.

"How anyone can be indifferent!" said Lidia Ivanovna.

"I am not so much indifferent on that subject as I am waiting in
suspense," said Stepan Arkadyevich, with his most deprecating smile.
"I hardly think that the time for such questions has come yet for me."

Alexei Alexandrovich and Lidia Ivanovna looked at each other.

"We can never tell whether the time has come for us or not," said
Alexei Alexandrovich sternly. "We ought not to think whether we are
ready or not ready. God's grace is not guided by human considerations:
sometimes it comes not to those who strive for it, and comes to
those who are unprepared, like Saul."

"No, I believe it won't be just yet," said Lidia Ivanovna, who had
been meanwhile watching the movements of the Frenchman. Landau got
up and came to them.

"Do you allow me to listen?" he asked.

"Oh, yes; I did not want to disturb you," said Lidia Ivanovna,
gazing tenderly at him; "sit here with us."

"One has only not to close one's eyes to shut out the light," Alexei
Alexandrovich went on.

"Ah, if you knew the happiness we know, feeling His presence ever in
our hearts!" said Countess Lidia Ivanovna with a rapturous smile.

"But a man may feel himself inapt sometimes to rise to that height,"
said Stepan Arkadyevich, conscious of hypocrisy in admitting this
religious height, but at the same time unable to bring himself to
acknowledge his freethinking views before a person who, by a single
word to Pomorsky, might procure him the coveted appointment.

"That is, you mean that sin keeps him back?" said Lidia Ivanovna.
"But that is a false idea. There is no sin for believers, their sin
has been atoned for. Pardon," she added, looking at the footman, who
came in again with another letter. She read it and gave a verbal
answer: "Tomorrow at the Grand Duchess's, say.- For the believer sin
is not," she went on.

"Yes, but faith without works is dead," said Stepan Arkadyevich,
recalling the phrase from the catechism, and only by his smile
clinging to his independence.

"There you have it- from the epistle of St. James," said Alexei
Alexandrovich, addressing Lidia Ivanovna, with a certain
reproachfulness in his tone. It was unmistakably a subject they had
discussed more than once before. "What harm has been done by the false
interpretation of that passage! Nothing holds men back from belief
like that misinterpretation. 'I have not works, so I cannot
believe,' though all the while that's not what is said, but the very
opposite."

"Striving for God, saving the soul by fasting," said Countess
Lidia Ivanovna, with disgusted contempt, "those are the crude ideas of
our monks.... Yet that is nowhere said. It is far simpler and easier,"
she added, looking at Oblonsky with the same encouraging smile with
which at Court she encouraged youthful maids of honor, disconcerted by
the new surroundings of the Court.

"We are saved by Christ who suffered for us. We are saved by faith,"
Alexei Alexandrovich chimed in, with a glance of approval at her
words.

"Vous comprenez l'anglais?" asked Lidia Ivanovna, and receiving a
reply in the affirmative, she got up and began looking through a shelf
of books.

"I want to read him Safe and Happy, or Under the Wing," she said,
looking inquiringly at Karenin. And finding the book, and sitting down
again in her place, she opened it. "It's very short. In it is
described the way by which faith can be reached, and the happiness,
above all earthly bliss, with which it fills the soul. The believer
cannot be unhappy because he is not alone. But you will see." She
was just settling herself to read when the footman came in again.
"Madame Borozdina? Tell her tomorrow, at two o'clock. Yes," she
said, marking the place in the book by inserting a finger, and
gazing before her with her fine pensive eyes, "that is how true
faith acts. You know Marie Sanina? You know about her trouble? She
lost her only child. She was in despair. And what happened? She
found this comforter, and she thanks God now for the death of her
child. Such is the happiness faith brings!"

"Oh, yes, that is most..." said Stepan Arkadyevich, glad they were
going to read, and let him have a chance to collect his faculties.
"No, I see I'd better not ask her about anything today," he thought.
"If only I can get out of this without putting my foot in it!"

"It will be dull for you," said Countess Lidia Ivanovna,
addressing Landau; "you don't know English- but it's short."

"Oh, I shall understand," said Landau, with the same smile, and he
closed his eyes.

Alexei Alexandrovich and Lidia Ivanovna exchanged meaning glances,
and the reading began.

                           XXII.


Stepan Arkadyevich felt completely nonplused by the strange talk
which he was hearing for the first time. The complexity of
Peterburg, as a rule, had a stimulating effect on him, rousing him out
of his Moscow stagnation. But he liked these complications, and
understood them only in the circles he knew and was at home in. In
these unfamiliar surroundings he was puzzled and disconcerted, and
could not get his bearings. As he listened to Countess Lidia Ivanovna,
aware of the beautiful, naive- or perhaps knavish, he could not decide
which- eyes of Landau fixed upon him, Stepan Arkadyevich began to be
conscious of a peculiar heaviness in his head.

The most incongruous ideas were in confusion in his head. "Marie
Sanina is glad her child's dead.... How good a smoke would be
now!... To be saved, one need only believe, and the monks don't know
how the thing's to be done, but Countess Lidia Ivanovna does
know.... And why is my head so heavy? Is it the cognac, or the fact of
all this being so very queer? Anyway, I fancy I've done nothing
unseemly so far. But, anyway, it won't do to ask her now. They say
they make one pray. I only hope they won't make me! That'll be too
imbecile. And what stuff it is she's reading! But she has a good
accent. Landau- Bezzubov- what's he Bezzubov for?" All at once
Stepan Arkadyevich became aware that his lower jaw was
uncontrollably forming a yawn. He pulled his whiskers to cover the
yawn, and shook himself together. But soon after he became aware
that he was dropping asleep and on the very point of snoring. He
recovered himself at the very moment when the voice of Countess
Lidia Ivanovna was saying "he's asleep."

Stepan Arkadyevich started with dismay, feeling guilty and caught.
But he was reassured at once by seeing that the words "he's asleep"
asleep referred not to him, but to Landau. The Frenchman had fallen
asleep as well as Stepan Arkadyevich. But Stepan Arkadyevich's being
asleep would have offended them, as he thought (though even this, he
thought, might not be so, as everything seemed so queer), while
Landau's being asleep delighted them extremely, especially Countess
Lidia Ivanovna.

"Mon ami," said Lidia Ivanovna, carefully holding the folds of her
silk gown so as not to rustle, and in her excitement calling Karenin
not Alexei Alexandrovich, but mon ami, "donnez-lui la main. Vous
voyez? Sh!" she hissed at the footman as he came in again. "Not at
home!"

The Frenchman was asleep, or pretending to be asleep, with his
head on the back of his chair, and his moist hand, as it lay on his
knee, made faint movements, as though trying to catch something.
Alexei Alexandrovich got up, tried to move carefully, but stumbled
against the table, drew up, and laid his hand in the Frenchman's hand.
Stepan Arkadyevich got up too, and opening his eyes wide, trying to
wake himself up if he was asleep, he looked first at one and then at
the other. It was all real. Stepan Arkadyevich felt that his head
was getting worse and worse.

"Que la personne qui est arrivee la derniere, celle qui demande,
qu'elle- sorte! Qu'elle sorte!" articulated the Frenchman, without
opening his eyes.

"Vous m'excuserez, mais vous voyez... Revenez vers dix heures,
encore mieux demain."

"Qu'elle sorte!" repeated the Frenchman impatiently.

"C'est moi, n'est-ce pas?" And receiving an answer in the
affirmative, Stepan Arkadyevich, forgetting the favor he had meant
to ask of Lidia Ivanovna, and forgetting his sister's affairs,
caring for nothing, but filled with the sole desire to escape as
soon as possible, went out on tiptoe and ran out into the street as
though from a plague-stricken house. For a long while he chatted and
joked with his driver, trying to recover his spirits.

At the French theater where he arrived for the last act, and
afterward at the Tatar restaurant after his champagne, Stepan
Arkadyevich felt a little refreshed in the atmosphere he was used
to. But still he felt quite unlike himself all that evening.

On getting home to Piotr Oblonsky's, where he was staying, Stepan
Arkadyevich found a note from Betsy. She wrote to him that she was
very anxious to finish their interrupted conversation, and begged
him to come the next day. He had scarcely read this note, and
frowned at its contents, when he heard below the ponderous tramp of
the servants carrying something heavy.

Stepan Arkadyevich went out to look. It was the rejuvenated Piotr
Oblonsky. He was so drunk that he could not walk upstairs; but he told
them to set him on his legs when he saw Stepan Arkadyevich, and,
clinging to him, walked with him into his room, and there began
telling him how he had spent the evening, and fell asleep doing so.

Stepan Arkadyevich was in very low spirits, which happened rarely
with him, and for a long while he could not go to sleep. Everything he
could recall to his mind, everything was disgusting; but, most
disgusting of all, as if it were something shameful, was the memory of
the evening he had spent at Countess Lidia Ivanovna's.

Next day he received from Alexei Alexandrovich a final answer,
refusing to grant Anna's divorce, and he understood that his
decision was based on what the Frenchman had said in his real or
pretended trance.

                           XXIII.


In order to carry through any undertaking in family life, there must
necessarily be either complete dissension between the husband and
wife, or loving agreement. When the relations of a couple are
vacillating and neither one thing nor the other, no sort of enterprise
can be undertaken.

Many families remain for years in the same place, though both
husband and wife are sick of it, simply because there is neither
complete dissension nor agreement between them.

Both Vronsky and Anna felt life in Moscow insupportable in the
heat and dust, when the spring sunshine was followed by the glare of
summer, and all the trees in the boulevards had long since been in
full leaf, and the leaves were covered with dust. But they did not
go back to Vozdvizhenskoe, as they had arranged to do long before;
they went staying on in Moscow, though they both loathed it, because
of late there had been no agreement between them.

The irritability that kept them apart had no external cause, and all
efforts to come to an understanding intensified it, instead of
removing it. It was an inner irritation, grounded in her mind on the
conviction that his love had grown less; in his, on regret that he had
put himself for her sake in a difficult position, which she, instead
of lightening, made still more difficult. Neither of them gave full
utterance to his or her sense of grievance, but they considered each
other in the wrong, and tried on every pretext to prove this to one
another.

In her eyes the whole of him, with all his habits, ideas, desires,
with all his spiritual and physical temperament, was one thing- love
for women, and that love, as she felt, ought to be entirely
concentrated on her alone. That love was less; consequently, as she
reasoned, he must have transferred part of his love to other women
or to another woman- and she was jealous. She was jealous not of any
particular woman but of the decrease of his love. Not having found
an object for her jealousy, she was on the lookout for it. At the
slightest hint she transferred her jealousy from one object to
another. At one time she was jealous of those low women with whom he
might so easily renew his old bachelor ties; then she was jealous of
the society women he might meet; then she was jealous of the imaginary
girl whom he might want to marry, for whose sake he would break with
her. And this last form of jealousy tortured her most of all,
especially as he had unwarily told her, in a moment of frankness, that
his mother knew him so little that she had had audacity to try to
persuade him to marry the young Princess Sorokina.

And being jealous of him, Anna was indignant against him and found
grounds for indignation in everything. For everything that was
difficult in her position she blamed him. The agonizing condition of
suspense she had passed at Moscow, the tardiness and indecision of
Alexei Alexandrovich, her solitude- she put it all down to him. If
he had loved her he would have seen all the bitterness of her
position, and would have rescued her from it. For her being in
Moscow and not in the country, he was to blame too. He could not
live buried in the country as she would have liked to do. He must have
society, and he had put her in this awful position, the bitterness
of which he would not see. And again, it was his fault that she was
forever separated from her son.

Even the rare moments of tenderness that came from time to time
did not soothe her; in his tenderness now she saw a shade of
complacency, of self-confidence, which had not been of old and which
exasperated her.

It was already dusk. Anna was alone, and waiting for him to come
back from a bachelor dinner. She walked up and down in his study
(the room where the noise from the street was least heard), and
thought over every detail of their yesterday's quarrel. Going back
from the well-remembered, offensive words of the quarrel to what had
been the ground of it, she arrived at last at its origin. For a long
while she could hardly believe that their dissension had arisen from a
conversation so inoffensive, of so little moment to either. But so
it actually had been. It all arose from his laughing at the girls'
high schools, declaring they were useless, while she defended them. He
had spoken slightingly of women's education in general, and had said
that Hannah, Anna's English protegee, had not the slightest need to
know anything of physics.

This had irritated Anna. She saw in this a contemptuous reference to
her occupations. And she had bethought her of a phrase to pay him back
for the pain he had inflicted upon her, and had uttered it.

"I don't expect you to understand me, my feelings, as anyone who
loved me might, but simple delicacy I did expect," she had said.

And he had actually flushed with vexation, and had said something
unpleasant. She could not recall her answer, but at that point, with
an unmistakable desire to wound her too, he had said:

"I feel no interest in your infatuation over this girl, that's true,
because I see it's unnatural."

The cruelty with which he shattered the world she had built up for
herself so laboriously to enable her to endure her hard life, the
injustice with which he had accused her of affectation, of
artificiality, aroused her.

"I am very sorry that nothing but the coarse and material is
comprehensible and natural to you," she had said, and walked out of
the room.

When he had come in to her yesterday evening, they had not
referred to the quarrel; both felt that the quarrel had been
smoothed over, but was not at an end.

Today he had not been at home all day, and she felt so lonely and
wretched in being on bad terms with him that she wanted to forget it
all, to forgive him, and be reconciled with him; she wanted to throw
the blame on herself and to justify him.

"I am myself to blame. I'm irritable, I'm insanely jealous. I will
make it up with him, and we'll go away to the country; there I shall
be more at peace," she said to herself.

"Unnatural!" She suddenly recalled the word that had stung her
most of all, not so much the word itself as the intent to wound her
with which it was said. "I know what he meant; he meant- unnatural,
not loving my own daughter to love another person's child. What does
he know of love for children, of my love for Seriozha, whom I've
sacrificed for him? But that wish to wound me! No, he loves another
woman, it can't be otherwise."

And perceiving that, while trying to regain her peace of mind, she
had gone round the same circle that she had been round so often
before, and had come back to her former state of exasperation, she was
horrified at herself. "Can it be impossible? Can I really take the
blame on myself?" she said to herself, and began again from the
beginning. "He's truthful, he's honest, he loves me. I love him, and
in a few days the divorce will come. What more do I want? I want peace
of mind and trust, and I will take the blame on myself. Yes, now
when he comes in, I will tell him I was wrong, though I was not wrong,
and we will go away."

And to escape thinking any more, and being overcome by irritability,
she rang and ordered the boxes to be brought up for packing their
things for the country.

At ten o'clock Vronsky came in.

                           XXIV.


"Well, was it amusing?" she asked, coming out to meet him with a
penitent and meek expression.

"Just as usual," he answered, seeing at a glance that she was in one
of her good moods. He was used by now to these transitions, and he was
particularly glad to see it today, as he was in a specially good humor
himself.

"What do I see? Come, that's good!" he said, pointing to the boxes
in the passage.

"Yes, we must go. I went out for a drive, and it was so fine I
longed to be in the country. There's nothing to keep you, is there?"

"It's the one thing I desire. I'll be back directly, and we'll
talk it over; I only want to change my coat. Order some tea."

And he went into his room.

There was something mortifying in the way he had said "Come,
that's good," as one says to a child when it leaves off being naughty,
and still more mortifying was the contrast between her penitent and
his self-confident tone; and for one instant she felt the lust of
strife rising up in her again, but making an effort she conquered
it, and met Vronsky as good-humoredly as before.

When he came in she told him, partly repeating phrases she had
prepared beforehand, how she had spent the day, and her plans for
going away.

"You know, it came to me almost like an inspiration," she said. "Why
wait here for the divorce? Won't it be just the same in the country? I
can't wait any longer! I don't want to go on hoping, I don't want to
hear anything about the divorce. I have made up my mind it shall not
have any more influence on my life. Do you agree?"

"Oh, yes!" he said, glancing uneasily at her excited face.

"What did you do? Who was there?" she said, after a pause.

Vronsky mentioned the names of the guests. "The dinner was
first-rate, and the boat race, and it was all pleasant enough, but
in Moscow they can never do anything without something ridicule. A
lady of a sort appeared on the scene, teacher of swimming to the Queen
of Sweden, and gave us an exhibition of her skill."

"How? Did she swim?" asked Anna, frowning.

"In an absurd red costume de natation; she was old and hideous
too. So when shall we go?"

"What an absurd fancy! Why, did she swim in some special way, then?"
said Anna, not answering.

"There was absolutely nothing in it. That's just what I say- it
was awfully stupid. Well, then, when do you think of going?"

Anna shook her head as though trying to drive away some unpleasant
idea.

"When? Why, the sooner the better! By tomorrow we shan't be ready.
The day after tomorrow."

"Yes.... Oh, no, wait a minute! The day after tomorrow's Sunday- I
have to be at maman's," said Vronsky, embarrassed, because as soon
as he uttered his mother's name he was aware of her intent, suspicious
eyes. His embarrassment confirmed her suspicion. She flushed hotly and
drew away from him. It was now not the Queen of Sweden's swimming
mistress who filled Anna's imagination, but the young Princess
Sorokina. She was staying in a village near Moscow with Countess
Vronsky.

"Can't you go tomorrow?" she said.

"Well, no! The deeds and the money for the business I'm going
there for I can't get by tomorrow," he answered.

"If so, we won't go at all."

"But why so?"

"I shall not go later. Monday or never!"

"What for?" said Vronsky, as though in amazement. "Why, there's no
meaning in it!"

"There's no meaning in it to you, because you care nothing for me.
You don't care to understand my life. The one thing that I cared for
here was Hannah. You say it's affectation. Why, you said yesterday
that I don't love my daughter, that I love this English girl, that
it's unnatural. I should like to know what life there is for me that
could be natural!"

For an instant she had a clear vision of what she was doing, and was
horrified at how she had fallen away from her resolution. But even
though she knew it was her own ruin, she could not restrain herself,
could not keep herself from proving to him that he was wrong, could
not give way to him.

"I never said that; I said I did not sympathize with this sudden
passion."

"How is it, though you boast of your straightforwardness, you
don't tell the truth?"

"I never boast, and I never tell lies," he said slowly,
restraining his rising anger. "It's a great pity if you can't
respect..."

"Respect was invented to cover the empty place where love should
be.... And if you don't love me any more, it would be better and
more honest to say so."

"No, this is becoming unbearable!" cried Vronsky, getting up from
his chair; and stopping short, facing her, he said speaking
deliberately:

"What do you try my patience for?" looking as though he might have
said much more, but was restraining himself. "It has limits."

"What do you mean by that?" she cried, looking with terror at the
undisguised hatred in his whole face, and especially in his cruel,
sinister eyes.

"I mean to say..." he was beginning, but he checked himself. "I must
ask what it is you want of me?"

"What I can want? All I can want is that you should not desert me,
as you think of doing," she said, understanding all he had not
uttered. "But that I don't want; that's secondary. I want love, and
there is none. So then, all is at an end."

She turned toward the door.

"Stop! sto-op!" said Vronsky, with no change in the gloomy lines
of his brows, though he held her by the hand. "What is it all about? I
said that we must put off going for three days, and on that you told
me I was lying, that I was not an honorable man."

"Yes, and I repeat that the man who reproaches me with having
sacrificed everything for me," she said, recalling the words of a
still earlier quarrel, "is worse than a dishonorable man- he's a
heartless man."

"Oh, there are limits to endurance!" he cried, and hastily let go
her hand.

"He hates me, that's clear," she thought, and in silence, without
looking round, she walked with faltering steps out of the room. "He
loves another woman, that's even clearer," she said to herself as
she went into her own room. "I want love, and there is none. So, then,
all is at an end," she repeated the words she had said, "and it must
be put to an end."

"But how?" she asked herself, and she sat down in a low chair before
the looking glass.

Thoughts of where she would go now, whether to the aunt who had
brought her up, to Dolly, or simply alone, abroad, and of what he
was doing now alone in his study; whether this was the final
quarrel, or whether reconciliation were still possible; and of what
all her old friends at Peterburg would say of her now; and of how
Alexei Alexandrovich would look at it, and many other ideas of what
would happen now after the rupture, came into her head; but she did
not give herself up to them with all her heart. At the bottom of her
heart was some obscure idea that alone interested her, but she could
not get clear sight of it. Thinking once more of Alexei Alexandrovich,
she recalled the time of her illness after her confinement, and the
feeling which never left her at that time. "Why didn't I die?" she
recalled the words and the feeling of that time. And all at once she
knew what was in her soul. Yes, it was that idea which alone solved
all. "Yes, to die!..."

"And the shame and disgrace of Alexei Alexandrovich and of Seriozha,
and my awful shame- death will be the salvation of everything. To die!
And he will feel remorse; will be sorry; will love me; he will
suffer on my account." With a fixed smile of commiseration for herself
she sat down in the armchair, taking off and putting on the rings on
her left hand, vividly picturing from different sides his feelings
after her death.

Approaching footsteps- his steps- distracted her attention. As
though absorbed in the arrangement of her rings, she did not even turn
to him.

He went up to her, and taking her by the hand, said softly:

"Anna, we'll go the day after tomorrow, if you like. I agree to
everything."

She did not speak.

"What is it?" he urged.

"You know," she said, and at the same instant, unable to restrain
herself any longer, she burst into sobs.

"Cast me off- do!"- she articulated between her sobs. "I'll go
away tomorrow.... I'll do more than that. What am I? A depraved woman!
A stone round your neck. I don't want to make you wretched; I don't
want to! I'll set you free. You don't love me; you love someone else!"

Vronsky besought her to be calm, and declared that there was no
trace of foundation for her jealousy; that he had never ceased, and
never would cease, to love her; that he loved her more than ever.

"Anna, why distress yourself and me so?" he said to her, kissing her
hands. There was tenderness now in his face, and she fancied she
caught the sound of tears in his voice, and she felt them wet on her
hand. And instantly Anna's despairing jealousy changed to a despairing
passion of tenderness. She put her arms round him, and covered with
kisses his head, his neck, his hands.

                           XXV.


Feeling that the reconciliation was complete, Anna set eagerly to
work in the morning preparing for their departure. Though it was not
settled whether they should go on Monday or Tuesday, as they had
each given way to the other, Anna packed busily, feeling absolutely
indifferent whether they went a day earlier or later. She was standing
in her room over an open box, taking things out of it, when he came in
to see her earlier than usual, dressed to go out.

"I'm going off at once to see maman; she can send me the money by
Iegorov. And I shall be ready to go tomorrow," he said.

Though she was in such a good mood, the mention of his visit to
his mother's gave her a pang.

"No, I shan't be ready by then myself," she said; and at once
reflected, "so then it was possible to arrange to do as I wished."-
"No, do as you meant to do. Go into the dining room, I'm coming
directly. It's only to turn out those things that aren't wanted,"
she said, putting something more on the heap of frippery that lay in
Annushka's arms.

Vronsky was eating his beefsteak when she came into the dining room.

"You wouldn't believe how distasteful these rooms have become to
me," she said, sitting down beside him to her coffee. "There's nothing
more awful than these chambres garnies. There's no individuality in
them, no soul. These clocks, and curtains, and, worst of all, the
wallpapers- they're a nightmare. I think of Vozdvizhenskoe as the
promised land. You're not sending the horses off yet?"

"No, they will come after us. Where are you going to?"

"I wanted to go to Wilson's to take some dresses to her. So it's
really to be tomorrow?" she said in a cheerful voice; but suddenly her
face changed.

Vronsky's valet came in to ask him to sign a receipt for a
telegram from Peterburg. There was nothing out of the way in Vronsky's
getting a telegram, but he said, as though anxious to conceal
something from her, that the receipt was in his study, and he turned
hurriedly to her.

"By tomorrow, without fail, I will finish it all."

"From whom is the telegram?" she asked, not hearing him.

"From Stiva," he answered reluctantly.

"Why didn't you show it to me? What secret can there be between
Stiva and me?"

Vronsky called the valet back, and told him to bring the telegram.

"I didn't want to show it to you, because Stiva has such a passion
for telegraphing: why telegraph when nothing is settled?"

"About the divorce?"

"Yes; but he says he has not been able to come at anything yet. He
has promised a decisive answer in a day or two. But here it is; read
it."

With trembling hands Anna took the telegram, and read what Vronsky
had told her. At the end was added: "little hope; but I will do
everything possible and impossible."

"I said yesterday that it's absolutely nothing to me when I get a
divorce, or whether I never get it," she said, flushing crimson.
"There was not the slightest necessity to hide it from me."- "So he
may hide, and does hide, his correspondence with women from me," she
thought.

"Iashvin meant to come this morning with Voitov," said Vronsky; "I
believe he's won from Pievtsov all and more than he can pay- about
sixty thousand."

"No," she said, further irritated by his so obviously showing by
this change of subject that he knew she was irritated, "why did you
suppose that this news would affect me so, that you must even try to
hide it? I said I don't want to consider it, and I should have liked
you to care as little about it as I do."

"I care about it because I like definiteness," he said.

"Definiteness is not in the form, but in love," she said, more and
more irritated, not by his words, but by the tone of cool composure in
which he spoke. "What do you want it for?"

"My God! Love again," he thought, frowning.

"Oh, you know what for; for your sake and your children's in the
future."

"There won't be any children in the future."

"That's a great pity," he said.

"You want it for the children's sake, but you don't think of me?"
she said, quite forgetting, or not having heard that he had said, "For
your sake and the children's."

The question of the possibility of having children had long been a
subject of dispute and irritation to her. His desire to have
children she interpreted as a proof he did not prize her beauty.

"Oh, I said: for your sake. Above all for your sake," he repeated,
frowning as though in pain, "because I am certain that the greater
part of your irritability comes from the indefiniteness of the
position."

"Yes, now he has laid aside all pretense, and all his cold hatred
for me is apparent," she thought, not hearing his words, but
watching with terror the cold, cruel judge who, mocking her, looked
out of his eyes.

"The cause isn't that," she said, "and, indeed, I don't see how
the cause of my irritability, as you call it, can be in my being
completely in your power. What indefiniteness is there in the
position? On the contrary."

"I am very sorry that you don't care to understand," he interrupted,
obstinately anxious to give utterance to his thought. "The
indefiniteness consists in your imagining that I am free."

"On that score you can set your mind quite at rest," she said, and
turning away from him, she began drinking her coffee.

She lifted her cup, with her little finger held apart, and put it to
her lips. After drinking a few sips she glanced at him, and by his
expression she saw clearly that he was repelled by her hand, and her
gesture, and the sound made by her lips.

"I don't care in the least what your mother thinks, and what match
she wants to make for you," she said, putting the cup down with a
shaking hand.

"But we are not talking about that."

"Yes, that's just what we are talking about. And let me tell you
that a heartless woman, whether she's old or not old, your mother or
anyone else, is of no consequence to me, and I would not consent to
know her."

"Anna, I beg you not to speak disrespectfully of my mother."

"A woman whose heart does not tell her where her son's happiness and
honor lie has no heart."

"I repeat my request that you will not speak disrespectfully of my
mother, whom I respect," he said, raising his voice and looking
sternly at her.

She did not answer. Looking intently at him, at his face, his hands,
she recalled all the details of their reconciliation the previous day,
and his passionate caresses. "There, just such caresses he has
lavished, and will lavish, and longs to lavish on other women!" she
thought.

"You don't love your mother. That's all talk, and talk, and talk!"
she said, looking at him with hatred in her eyes.

"Even if so, you must..."

"Must decide, and I have decided," she said, and she would have gone
away, but at that moment Iashvin walked into the room. Anna greeted
him and remained.

Why, when there was a tempest in her soul, and she felt she was
standing at a turning point in her life, which might have fearful
consequences- why, at that minute, she had to keep up appearances
before an outsider, who sooner or later must know it all- she did
not know. But at once quelling the storm within her, she sat down
and began talking to their guest.

"Well, how are you getting on? Has your debt been paid you?" she
asked Iashvin.

"Oh, pretty fair; I fancy I shan't get it all, while I ought to go
on Wednesday. And when are you off?" said Iashvin, looking at Vronsky,
and unmistakably surmising a quarrel.

"The day after tomorrow, I think," said Vronsky.

"You've been intending to go so long, though."

"But now it's quite decided," said Anna, looking Vronsky straight in
the face with a look which told him not to dream of the possibility of
reconciliation.

"Don't you feel sorry for that unlucky Pievtsov?" she went on,
talking to Iashvin.

"I've never asked myself the question, Anna Arkadyevna, whether
I'm sorry for him or not. You see, all my fortune's here"- he
touched his breast pocket- "and just now I'm a wealthy man. But
today I'm going to the club, and I may come out a beggar. You see,
whoever sits down to play with me wants to leave me without a shirt to
my back, and I wish the same to him. And so we fight it out, and
that's the pleasure of it."

"Well, but suppose you were married," said Anna, "how would it be
for your wife?"

Iashvin laughed.

"That's to all appearance why I'm not married, and never mean to
be."

"And Helsingfors?" said Vronsky, entering into the conversation
and glancing at Anna's smiling face. Meeting his eyes, Anna's face
instantly took a coldly severe expression as though she were saying to
him: "It's not forgotten. It's all the same."

"Were you really in love?" she said to Iashvin.

"Oh heavens! Ever so many times! But, you see, some men can play,
but only so that they can always lay down their cards when the hour of
a rendez-vous comes, while I can take up love, but only so as not to
be late for my cards in the evening. That's how I manage things."

"No, I didn't mean that, but the real thing." She would have said
Helsingfors, but would not repeat the word used by Vronsky.

Voitov, who was buying the horse, came in. Anna got up and went
out of the room.

Before leaving the house, Vronsky went into her room. She would have
pretended to be looking for something on the table, but ashamed of
making a pretense, she looked straight in his face with cold eyes.

"What do you want?" she asked in French.

"To get the guarantee for Gambetta- I've sold him," he said, in a
tone which said more clearly than words, "I've no time for
discussing things, and it would lead to nothing."

"I'm not to blame in any way," he thought. "If she will punish
herself, tant pis pour elle." But as he was going he fancied that
she said something, and his heart suddenly ached with pity for her.

"Eh, Anna?" he queried.

"I said nothing," she answered just as coldly and calmly.

"Oh, nothing, tant pis then," he thought, feeling cold again, and he
turned and went out. As he was going out he caught a glimpse in the
looking glass of her face, white, with quivering lips. He even
wanted to stop and to say some comforting word to her, but his legs
carried him out of the room before he could think what to say. The
whole of that day he spent away from home, and when he came in late in
the evening the maid told him that Anna Arkadyevna had a headache
and begged him not to go in to her.

                           XXVI.


Never before had a day been passed in quarrel. Today was the first
time. And this was not a quarrel. It was the open acknowledgment of
complete coldness. Was it possible to glance at her as he had
glanced when he came into the room for the guarantee?- to look at her,
see her heart was breaking with despair, and go out without a word
with that face of callous composure? He was not merely cold to her, he
hated her because he loved another woman- that was clear.

And remembering all the cruel words he had said, Anna supplied, too,
the words that he had unmistakably wished to say and could have said
to her, and she grew more and more exasperated.

"I won't prevent you," he might say. "You can go where you like. You
were unwilling to be divorced from your husband, no doubt so that
you might go back to him. Go back to him. If you want money, I'll give
it to you. How many roubles do you want?"

All the most cruel words that a brutal man could say, he said to her
in her imagination, and she could not forgive him for them, as
though he had actually said them.

"But didn't he only yesterday swear he loved me, he, a truthful
and sincere man? Haven't I despaired for nothing many times
already?" she said to herself right after this.

All that day, except for the visit to Wilson's, which occupied two
hours, Anna spent in doubts whether everything were over or whether
there were still hope of reconciliation; whether she should go away at
once or see him once more. She was expecting him the whole day, and in
the evening, as she went to her own room, leaving a message for him
that her head ached, she said to herself, "If he comes in spite of
what the maid says, it means that he loves me still. If not, it
means that all is over, and then I will decide what I am to do!..."

In the evening she heard the rumbling of his carriage stop at the
entrance, his ring, his steps, and his conversation with the
servant; he believed what was told him, did not care to find out more,
and went to his own room. So then, everything was at an end.

And death rose clearly and vividly before her mind as the sole means
of bringing back love for her in his heart, of punishing him and of
gaining the victory in that strife which the evil spirit in possession
of her heart was waging with him.

Now nothing mattered: going or not going to Vozdvizhenskoe,
getting or not getting a divorce from her husband- all that did not
matter. The one thing that mattered was punishing him.

When she poured herself out her usual dose of opium, and thought
that she had only to drink off the whole bottle to die, it seemed to
her so simple and easy, that she began musing with enjoyment on how he
would suffer, and repent, and love her memory when it would be too
late. She lay in bed with open eyes, by the light of a single
guttering candle, gazing at the carved cornice of the ceiling and at
the shadow of the screen that covered part of it, while she vividly
pictured to herself how he would feel when she would be no more,
when she would be only a memory to him. "How could I say such cruel
things to her?" he would say. "How could I go out of the room
without saying anything to her? But now she is no more. She has gone
away from us forever. She is..." Suddenly the shadow of the screen
wavered, pounced on the whole cornice, the whole ceiling; other
shadows from the other side swooped to meet it; for an instant the
shadows flitted back, but then with fresh swiftness they darted
forward, wavered, mingled, and all was darkness. "Death!" she thought.
And such horror came upon her that for a long while she could not
realize where she was, and for a long while her trembling hands
could not find the matches and light another candle, instead of the
one that had burned down and gone out. "No, anything- only to live!
Why, I love him! Why, he loves me! This has been before and will
pass," she said, feeling that tears of joy at the return to life
were trickling down her cheeks. And to escape from her panic she
went hurriedly to his room.

He was asleep there, and sleeping soundly. She went up to him, and
holding the light above his face, she gazed a long while at him. Now
when he was asleep, she loved him so that at the sight of him she
could not keep back tears of tenderness. But she knew that if he waked
up he would look at her with cold eyes, convinced that he was right,
and that before telling him of her love, she would have to prove to
him that he had been wrong in his treatment of her. Without waking
him, she went back, and after a second dose of opium she fell toward
morning into a heavy, incomplete sleep, during which she never quite
lost consciousness.

In the morning she was waked by a horrible nightmare, which had
recurred several times in her dreams, even before her connection
with Vronsky. A little old man with unkempt beard was doing something,
stooping over some iron, muttering meaningless French words, and
she, as she always did in this nightmare (it was what made the
horror of it), felt that this peasant was taking no notice of her, but
was doing something horrible with the iron- over her. And she waked up
in a cold sweat.

When she got up, the previous day came back to her as though
veiled in mist.

"There was a quarrel. Just what has happened several times. I said I
had a headache, and he did not come in to see me. Tomorrow we're going
away; I must see him and get ready for the journey," she said to
herself. And learning that he was in his study, she went down to
him. As she passed through the drawing room she heard a carriage
stop at the entrance, and looking out of the window she saw the
carriage, from which a young girl in a lilac hat was leaning out,
giving some direction to the footman who was ringing the bell. After a
parley in the hall, someone came upstairs, and Vronsky's steps could
be heard passing the drawing room. He went rapidly downstairs. Anna
went again to the window. She saw him come out on the steps without
his hat and go up to the carriage. The young girl in the lilac hat
handed him a parcel. Vronsky, smiling, said something to her. The
carriage drove away; he ran rapidly upstairs again.

The mists that had shrouded everything in her soul parted
suddenly. The feelings of yesterday pierced the sick heart with a
fresh pang. She could not understand now how she could have lowered
herself by spending a whole day with him in his house. She went into
his room to announce her determination.

"That was Madame Sorokina and her daughter. They came and brought me
the money and the deeds from maman. I couldn't get them yesterday. How
is your head, better?" he said quietly, not wishing to see and to
understand the gloomy and solemn expression of her face.

She looked silently, intently at him, standing in the middle of
the room. He glanced at her, frowned for a moment, and went on reading
a letter. She turned, and went deliberately out of the room. He
still might have turned her back, but she had reached the door, he was
still silent, and the only sound audible was the rustling of the
note paper as he turned it.

"Oh, by the way," he said at the very moment she was in the doorway,
"we're going tomorrow for certain, aren't we?"

"You, but not I," she said, turning round to him.

"Anna, we can't go on like this..."

"You, but not I," she repeated.

"This is getting unbearable!"

"You... You will be sorry for this," she said, and went out.

Frightened by the desperate expression with which these words were
uttered, he jumped up and would have run after her, but on second
thoughts he sat down and scowled, setting his teeth. This vulgar- as
he thought it- threat of something vague exasperated him. "I've
tried everything," he thought; "the only thing left is not to pay
attention," and he began to get ready to drive into town, and again to
his mother's, to get her signature to the deeds.

She heard the sound of his steps about the study and the dining
room. At the drawing room he stood still. But he did not turn in to
see her; he merely gave an order that the horse should be given to
Voitov if he came while he was away. Then she heard the carriage
brought round, the door opened, and he came out again. But he went
back into the porch again, and someone was running upstairs. It was
the valet running up for his forgotten gloves. She went to the
window and saw him take the gloves without looking, and, touching
the coachman on the back, he said something to him. Then, without
looking up at the window, he settled himself in his usual attitude
in the carriage, with his legs crossed, and, drawing on his gloves, he
vanished round the corner.

                           XXVII.


"He has gone! It is the end!" Anna said to herself, standing at
the window; and in answer to this question the impression of the
darkness when the candle had flickered out and of her fearful dream,
mingling into one, filled her heart with cold terror.

"No, that cannot be!" she cried, and crossing the room she rang
the bell. She was afraid now of being alone, that, without waiting for
the servant to come in, she went out to meet him.

"Inquire where the Count has gone," she said.

The servant answered that the Count had gone to the stable.

"His Honor left word that if you cared to drive out, the carriage
would be back immediately."

"Very good. Wait a minute. I'll write a note at once. Send Mikhail
with the note to the stables. Make haste."

She sat down and wrote:

"I was wrong. Come back home; I must explain. For God's sake come!
I'm afraid."

She sealed it up and gave it to the servant.

She was afraid of being left alone now; she followed the servant out
of the room, and went to the nursery.

"Why, this isn't it- this isn't he! Where are his blue eyes, his
sweet, shy smile?" was her first thought when she saw her chubby, rosy
little girl, with her black, curly hair, instead of Seriozha, whom
in the tangle of her ideas she had expected to see in the nursery. The
little girl sitting at the table was obstinately and violently
battering on it with a cork, and staring aimlessly at her mother
with her pitch-black eyes. Answering the English nurse that she was
quite well, and that she was going to the country tomorrow, Anna sat
down by the little girl and began spinning the cork to show her. But
the child's loud, ringing laugh, and the motion of her eyebrows,
recalled Vronsky so vividly that she got up hurriedly, restraining her
sobs, and went away. "Can it be all over? No, it cannot be!" she
thought. "He will come back. But how can he explain that smile, that
excitement after he had been talking to her? But even if he doesn't
explain, I will believe. If I don't believe, there's only one thing
left for me... and I can't do it."

She looked at her watch. Twenty minutes had passed. "By now he has
received the note and is coming back. Not long, ten minutes more....
But what if he doesn't come? No, that cannot be. He mustn't see me
with tear-stained eyes. I'll go and wash. Yes, yes; did I do my hair
or not?" she asked herself. And she could not remember. She felt her
head with her hand. "Yes, my hair has been done, but when I did it I
can't in the least remember." She could not believe the evidence of
her hand, and went up to the pier glass to see whether she really
had done her hair. She certainly had, but she could not think when she
had done it. "Who's that?" she thought, looking in the looking glass
at the swollen face with strangely glittering eyes, that looked in a
scared way at her. "Why, it's I!" she suddenly understood, and,
looking round, she seemed all at once to feel his kisses on her, and
twitched her shoulders, shuddering. Then she lifted her hand to her
lips and kissed it.

"What is it? Why, I'm going out of my mind!" And she went into her
bedroom, where Annushka was tidying the room.

"Annushka," she said, coming to a standstill before her, and she
stared at the maid, not knowing what to say to her.

"You meant to go and see Darya Alexandrovna," said the maid, as
though she understood.

"Darya Alexandrovna? Yes, I'll go."

"Fifteen minutes there, fifteen minutes back. He's coming, he'll
be here soon." She took out her watch and looked at it. "But how could
he go away, leaving me in such a state? How can he live, without
making it up with me?" She went to the window and began looking into
the street. Judging by the time, he might be back now. But her
calculations might be wrong, and she began once more to recall when he
had started and to count the minutes.

At the moment when she had moved away to the big clock to compare it
with her watch, someone drove up. Glancing out of the window, she
saw his carriage. But no one came upstairs, and voices could be
heard below. It was the messenger who had come back in the carriage.
She went down to him.

"We didn't catch the Count. The Count had driven off on the
Nizhny-Novgorod line."

"What do you say? What!..." she said to the rosy, good-humored
Mikhail, as he handed her back her note.

"Why, then, he has never received it!" she thought.

"Go with this note to Countess Vronsky's place in the country- do
you know where it is? And bring an answer back immediately," she
said to the messenger.

"And I- what am I going to do?" she thought. "Yes, I'm going to
Dolly's- that's best, or else I shall go out of my mind. Yes, and I
can telegraph, too." And she wrote a telegram:

"I absolutely must talk to you; come at once."

After sending off the telegram, she went to dress. When she was
dressed and in her hat, she glanced again into the eyes of the
plump, comfortable-looking Annushka. There was unmistakable sympathy
in those good-natured little gray eyes.

"Annushka, dear, what am I to do?" said Anna, sobbing and sinking
helplessly into a chair.

"Why fret yourself so, Anna Arkadyevna? Why, there's nothing out
of the way. You drive out a little, and it'll cheer you up," said
the maid.

"Yes, I'm going," said Anna, rousing herself and getting up. "And if
there's a telegram while I'm away, send it on to Darya
Alexandrovna's.... But no, I shall be back myself."

"Yes, I mustn't think; I must do something, drive somewhere, and,
most of all, get out of this house," she said, feeling with terror the
strange turmoil going on in her own heart, and she made haste to go
out, and get into the carriage.

"Where to?" asked Piotr before getting on the box.

"The Znamenka- the Oblonskys'."

                           XXVIII.


It was bright and sunny. A fine rain had been falling all the
morning, and now it had not long cleared up. The iron roofs, the flags
of the sidewalks, the cobbles of the pavements, the wheels and
leather, the brass and the tinplate of the carriages- all glistened
brightly in the May sunshine. It was three o'clock, and the very
liveliest time in the streets.

As she sat in a corner of the comfortable carriage that hardly
swayed on its supple springs, while the grays trotted swiftly, in
the midst of the unceasing rattle of wheels and the changing
impressions in the pure air, Anna ran over the events of the last
days, and she saw her position quite differently from what it had
seemed at home. Now the thought of death seemed no longer so
terrible and so clear to her, and death itself no longer seemed so
inevitable. Now she blamed herself for the humiliation to which she
had lowered herself. "I entreat him to forgive me. I have given in
to him. I have owned myself in fault. What for? Can't I live without
him?" And leaving unanswered the question how she was going to live
without him, she fell to reading the signs on the shops. "Office and
warehouse. Dental surgeon. Yes, I'll tell Dolly all about it. She
doesn't like Vronsky. I shall be sick and ashamed, but I'll tell her
everything. She loves me, and I'll follow her advice. I won't give
in to him; I won't let him train me as he pleases. Filippov,
'Kalaches.' They say he sends his dough to Peterburg. The Moscow water
is so good for it. And the wells at Mitishchy, and the pancakes."
And she remembered how, long, long ago, when she was a girl of
seventeen, she had gone with her aunt to Troitsa. "By horses at that
time. Was that really me, with red hands? How much of that which
seemed to me then splendid and out of reach has become worthless,
while what I had then has gone out of my reach forever! Could I ever
have believed then that I could come to such humiliation? How proud
and satisfied he will be when he gets my note! But I will show him....
How horrid that paint smells! Why is it they're always painting and
building? Modes et robes!" she read. A man bowed to her. It was
Annushka's husband. "Our parasites,"- she remembered how Vronsky had
said that. "Our? Why our? What's so awful is that one can't tear up
the past by its roots. One can't tear it out, but one can hide one's
memory of it. And I'll hide it." And then she thought of her past with
Alexei Alexandrovich, of how she had blotted it out of her memory.
"Dolly will think I'm leaving my second husband, and so I certainly
must be in the wrong. As if I cared to be right! I can't help it!" she
said, and she wanted to cry. But at once she fell to wondering what
those two girls could be smiling about. "Love, most likely. They don't
know how dreary it is, how low.... The boulevard and the children.
Three boys running, playing at horses. Seriozha! And I'm losing
everything and not getting him back. Yes, I'm losing everything, if he
doesn't return. Perhaps he was late for the train and has come back by
now. Longing for humiliation again!" she said to herself. "No, I'll go
to Dolly, and say straight out to her: I'm unhappy, I deserve this,
I'm to blame, but still I'm unhappy, help me. These horses, this
carriage- how loathsome I am to myself in this carriage- all his;
but I won't see them again."

Thinking over the words in which she would tell Dolly, and
intentionally working her heart up to great bitterness, Anna went
upstairs.

"Is there anyone with her?" she asked in the hall.

"Katerina Alexandrovna Levina," answered the footman.

"Kitty! Kitty, whom Vronsky was in love with!" thought Anna. "The
girl he thinks of with love. He's sorry he didn't marry her. But me he
thinks of with hatred, and is sorry he had anything to do with me."

The sisters were having a consultation about nursing when Anna
called. Dolly went down alone to see the visitor who had interrupted
their conversation.

"Well, so you've not gone away yet? I meant to have come to you,"
she said; "I had a letter from Stiva today."

"We had a telegram too," answered Anna, looking round for Kitty.

"He writes that he can't make out quite what Alexei Alexandrovich
wants, but he won't go away without a decisive answer."

"I thought you had someone with you. Can I see the letter?"

"Yes- it's Kitty," said Dolly, embarrassed. "She stayed in the
nursery. She has been very ill."

"So I heard. May I see the letter?"

"I'll get it directly. But he doesn't refuse; on the contrary, Stiva
has hopes," said Dolly, stopping in the doorway.

"I haven't, and indeed I don't wish it," said Anna.

"What's this? Does Kitty consider it degrading to meet me?"
thought Anna when she was alone. "Perhaps she's right, too. But it's
not for her, the girl who was in love with Vronsky, it's not for her
to show me that, even if it is true. I know that in my position I
can't be received by any decent woman. I knew that from the first
moment I sacrificed everything to him. And this is my reward! Oh,
how I hate him! And what did I come here for? I'm worse here, more
miserable." She heard from the next room the sisters' voices in
consultation. "And what am I going to say to Dolly now? Amuse Kitty by
the sight of my wretchedness, submit to her patronizing? No; and
besides, Dolly wouldn't understand. And it would be no good my telling
her. It would only be interesting to see Kitty, to show her how I
despise everyone and everything, how nothing matters to me now."

Dolly came in with the letter. Anna read it and handed it back in
silence.

"I knew all that," she said, "and it doesn't interest me in the
least."

"Oh, why so? On the contrary, I have hopes," said Dolly, looking
inquisitively at Anna. She had never seen her in such a strangely
irritable condition. "When are you going away?" she asked.

Anna, half-closing her eyes, looked straight before her and did
not answer.

"Why does Kitty shrink from me?" she said, looking at the door and
flushing red.

"Oh, what nonsense! She's nursing, and things aren't going right
with her, and I've been advising her.... She's delighted. She'll be
here in a minute," said Dolly awkwardly, not clever at lying. "Yes,
here she is."

Hearing that Anna had called, Kitty had wanted not to appear, but
Dolly persuaded her. Rallying her forces, Kitty went in, walked up
to her, blushing, and shook hands.

"I am so glad to see you," she said with a trembling voice.

Kitty had been thrown into confusion by the inward conflict
between her antagonism to this bad woman and her desire to be kind
to her. But as soon as she saw Anna's lovely and attractive face,
all feeling of antagonism disappeared.

"I should not have been surprised if you had not cared to meet me.
I'm used to everything. You have been ill? Yes, you are changed," said
Anna.

Kitty felt that Anna was looking at her with hostile eyes. She
ascribed this hostility to the awkward position in which Anna, who had
once patronized her, must feel with her now, and she felt sorry for
her.

They talked of Kitty's illness, of the baby, of Stiva, but it was
obvious that nothing interested Anna.

"I came to say good-by to you," she said, getting up.

"Oh, when are you going?"

But again not answering, Anna turned to Kitty.

"Yes, I am very glad to have seen you," she said with a smile. "I
have heard so much of you from everyone, even from your husband. He
came to see me, and I liked him very much," she said, unmistakably
with malicious intent. "Where is he?"

"He has gone back to the country," said Kitty, blushing.

"Remember me to him- be sure you do."

"I'll be sure to!" Kitty said naively, looking compassionately
into her eyes.

"Good-by, then, Dolly." And kissing Dolly and shaking hands with
Kitty, Anna went out hurriedly.

"She's just the same and just as charming! She's very lovely!"
said Kitty, when she was alone with her sister. "But there's something
piteous about her. Awfully piteous!"

"Yes, there's something unusual about her today," said Dolly.
"When I went with her into the hall, I fancied she was almost crying."

                           XXIX.


Anna got into the carriage again in an even worse frame of mind than
when she set out from home. To her previous tortures was added now
that sense of mortification and of being an outcast, which she had
felt so distinctly on meeting Kitty.

"Where to? Home?" asked Piotr.

"Yes, home," she said, not even thinking now where she was going.

"How they looked at me as something dreadful, incomprehensible,
and curious! What can he be telling the other with such warmth?" she
thought, staring at two men who walked by. "Can one ever tell anyone
what one is feeling? I meant to tell Dolly, and it's a good thing I
didn't tell her. How pleased she would have been at my misery! She
would have concealed it, but her chief feeling would have been delight
at my being punished for the happiness she envied me for. Kitty- she
would have been even more pleased. How I can see through her! She
knows I was more than usually kind to her husband. And she's jealous
and hates me. And she despises me. In her eyes I'm an immoral woman.
If I were an immoral woman I could have made her husband fall in
love with me.... If I'd cared to. And, indeed, I did care to.
There's someone who's pleased with himself," she thought, as she saw a
fat, rubicund gentleman coming toward her. He took her for an
acquaintance, and lifted his glossy hat above his bald, glossy head,
and then perceived his mistake. "He thought he knew me. Well, he knows
me as well as anyone in the world knows me. I don't know myself. I
know my appetites, as the French say. They want that hokey-pokey, that
they do know for certain," she thought, looking at two boys stopping
an ice-cream seller, who took a barrel off his head and began wiping
his perspiring face with a towel. "We all want what is sweet and
tastes good. If there are no sweetmeats, then a hokey-pokey will do.
And Kitty's the same- if not Vronsky, then Levin. And she envies me.
And hates me. And we all hate each other. I Kitty- Kitty me. Yes,
that's the truth. Tiutkin, coiffeur.... Je me fais coiffer par
Tiutkin.... I'll tell him that when he comes," she thought and smiled.
But the same instant she remembered that she had no one now to tell
anything amusing to. "And there's nothing amusing, nothing mirthful,
really. It's all hateful. Vesper bells- and how carefully that
merchant crosses himself! As if he were afraid of missing something.
Why these churches, and these bells, and this humbug? Simply to
conceal that we all hate each other like these cabdrivers, who are
abusing each other so angrily. Iashvin says, 'He wants to strip me
of my shirt, and I wish him the same.' Yes, that's the truth!"

She was plunged in these thoughts, which so engrossed her that she
left off thinking of her own position, when the carriage drew up at
the steps of her house. It was only when she saw the porter running
out to meet her that she remembered she had sent the note and the
telegram.

"Is there any answer?" she inquired.

"I'll see this minute," answered the porter, and, glancing into
his room, he took out and gave her the thin square envelope of a
telegram. "I can't come before ten o'clock.- Vronsky," she read.

"And hasn't the messenger come back?"

"No," answered the porter.

"Then, since it's so, I know what I must do," she said, and
feeling a vague fury and craving for revenge rising up within her, she
ran upstairs. "I'll go to him myself. Before going away forever,
I'll tell him all. Never have I hated anyone as I hate that man!"
she thought. Seeing his hat on the rack, she shuddered with
aversion. She did not consider that this telegram was an answer to her
telegram and that he had not yet received her note. She pictured him
to herself as talking calmly to his mother and Princess Sorokina,
and rejoicing at her sufferings. "Yes, I must go quickly," she said,
not knowing yet where she was going. She longed to get away as quickly
as possible from the feelings she had gone through in that awful
house. The servants, the walls, the things in that house- all
aroused repulsion and hatred in her and lay like a weight upon her.

"Yes, I must go to the railway station, and if he's not there,
then go there and catch him." Anna looked at the railway timetable
in the newspapers. An evening train went at two minutes past eight.
"Yes, I shall be in time." She gave orders for the other horses to
be put in the carriage, and packed in a traveling bag the things
needed for a few days. She knew she would never come back here again.

Among the plans that came into her head she vaguely determined
that after what would happen at the station or at the Countess's
house, she would go as far as the first town on the Nizhny-Novgorod
railway and stop there.

Dinner was on the table; she went up, but the smell of the bread and
cheese was enough to make her feel that all food was disgusting. She
ordered the carriage and went out. The house threw a shadow now
right across the street, but it was a bright evening and still warm in
the sunshine. Annushka, who came down with her things, and Piotr,
who put the things in the carriage, and the coachman, evidently out of
humor, were all hateful to her, and irritated her by their words and
actions.

"I don't want you, Piotr."

"But how about the ticket?"

"Well, as you like, it doesn't matter," she said crossly.

Piotr jumped on the box, and putting his arms akimbo, told the
coachman to drive to the station.

                           XXX.


"Here it is again! Again I understand it all!" Anna said to herself,
as soon as the carriage had started and swaying lightly, rumbled
over the small cobbles of the paved road, and again one impression
followed rapidly upon another.

"Yes; what was the last thing I thought of so clearly?" she tried to
recall. "Tiutkin, coiffeur?- No, not that. Yes, of what Iashvin
says, the struggle for existence and hatred is all that holds men
together. No, it's a useless journey you're making," she said,
mentally addressing a party in a coach and four, evidently going for
an excursion into the country. "And the dog you're taking with you
will be no help to you. You can't get away from yourselves." Turning
her eyes in the direction Piotr had turned to look, she saw a
factory hand almost dead-drunk, with hanging head, being led away by a
policeman. "Come, he's found a quicker way," she thought. "Count
Vronsky and I did not find that happiness either, though we expected
so much from it." And now for the first time Anna turned that
glaring light in which she was seeing everything on her relations with
him, which she had hitherto avoided thinking about. "What was it he
sought in me? Not love so much as the satisfaction of vanity." She
remembered his words, the expression of his face, that recalled a
submissive setter dog, in the early days of their connection. And
everything now confirmed this. "Yes, there was the triumph of vanity
in him. Of course there was love too, but the chief element was the
pride of success. He boasted of me. Now that's over. There's nothing
to be proud of. Not to be proud of, but to be ashamed of. He has taken
from me all he could, and now I am no use to him. He is weary of me
and is trying not to be dishonorable in his behavior to me. He let
that out yesterday- he wants divorce and marriage so as to burn his
ships. He loves me, but how? The zest is gone, as the English say.
That fellow wants everyone to admire him and is very much pleased with
himself," she thought, looking at a red-faced clerk, riding on a
riding-school horse. "Yes, there's not the same zest about me for
him now. If I go away from him, at the bottom of his heart he will
be glad."

This was not mere supposition, she saw it distinctly in the piercing
light which revealed to her now the meaning of life and human
relations.

"My love keeps growing more passionate and egoistic, while his is
waning and waning, and that's why we're drifting apart." She went on
musing. "And there's no help for it. He is everything for me, and I
want him more and more to give himself up to me entirely. And he wants
more and more to get away from me. Precisely: we went to meet one
another up to the time of our liaison, and since then we have been
irresistibly drifting in different directions. And there's no altering
that. He tells me I'm insanely jealous, and I have told myself that
I am insanely jealous; but it's not true. I'm not jealous, but I'm
unsatisfied. But..." she opened her lips, and shifted her place in the
carriage in the excitement, aroused by the thought that suddenly
struck her. "If I could be anything but a mistress, passionately
caring for nothing but his caresses; but I can't, and I don't care
to be anything else. And by that desire I rouse aversion in him, and
he rouses fury in me, and it cannot be different. Don't I know that he
wouldn't deceive me, that he has no schemes about Princess Sorokina,
that he's not in love with Kitty, that he won't desert me! I know
all that, but it makes it no better for me. If without loving me, from
duty, he'll be good and kind to me, without what I want- that's a
thousand times worse than unkindness! That's hell! And that's just how
it is. For a long while now he hasn't loved me. And where love ends,
hate begins. I don't know these streets at all. Hills, apparently, and
still houses, and houses.... And in the houses always people and
people.... How many of them- no end, and all hating each other!
Come, let me try and think what I want to make me happy. Well? Suppose
I am divorced, and Alexei Alexandrovich lets me have Seriozha, and I
marry Vronsky." Thinking of Alexei Alexandrovich, she at once pictured
him with extraordinary vividness as though he were alive before her,
with his mild, lifeless, dull eyes, the blue veins on his white hands,
his intonations, and the cracking of his fingers, and remembering
the feeling which had existed between them, and which was also
called love, she shuddered with loathing. "Well, I'm divorced, and
become Vronsky's wife. Well, will Kitty cease looking at me as she
looked at me today? No. And will Seriozha leave off asking and
wondering about my two husbands? And is there any new feeling I can
awaken between Vronsky and me? Is there possible, if not happiness,
some sort of ease from misery? No, no!" she answered now without the
slightest hesitation. "Impossible! We are drawn apart by life, and I
make his unhappiness, and he mine, and there's no altering him or
me. Every attempt has been made, the screw has come unscrewed. Oh, a
beggar woman with a baby. She thinks I'm sorry for her. Aren't we
all flung into the world only to hate each other, and so to torture
ourselves and each other? Schoolboys coming- laughing- Seriozha?"
she thought. "I thought, too, that I loved him, and used to be touched
by my own tenderness. But I have lived without him, I gave him up
for another love, and did not regret the exchange till that love was
satisfied." And with loathing she thought of what she meant by that
love. And the clearness with which she saw life now, her own and all
men's was a pleasure to her. "It's so with me and Piotr, and Fiodor
the coachman, and that merchant, and all the people living along the
Volga, where those placards invite one to go, and everywhere and
always," she thought when she had driven under the low-pitched roof of
the Nizhny-Novgorod station and the porters ran to meet her.

"A ticket to Obiralovka?" said Piotr.

She had utterly forgotten where and why she was going, and only by a
great effort she understood the question.

"Yes," she said, handing him her purse, and, taking a little red bag
in her hand, she got out of the carriage.

Making her way through the crowd to the first-class waiting room,
she gradually recollected all the details of her position, and the
plans between which she was hesitating. And again at the old sore
places, hope and then despair scraped the wounds of her tortured,
fearfully throbbing heart. As she sat on the star-shaped sofa
waiting for the train, she gazed with aversion at the people coming
and going (they were all hateful to her), and thought how she would
arrive at the station, would write him a note, and what she would
write to him, and how he was at this moment complaining to his
mother of his position, not understanding her sufferings, and how
she would go into the room, and what she would say to him. Then she
thought that life might still be happy, and how miserably she loved
and hated him, and how fearfully her heart was beating.

                           XXXI.


A bell rang, some young men, ugly and impudent, and at the same time
careful of the impression they were making, hurried by. Piotr, too,
crossed the room in his livery and spatterdashes with his dull,
brutish face, and came up to her to take her to the train. The noisy
young men were quiet as she passed them on the platform, and one
whispered something about her to another- something vile, no doubt.
She stepped up on the high step, and sat down in a carriage by herself
on a dirty spring seat that had once been white. Her bag lay beside
her, shaken up and down by the springiness of the seat. With a foolish
smile Piotr raised his hat, with its gallooned band, at the window, in
token of farewell; an impudent conductor slammed the door and the
latch. A grotesque-looking lady wearing a bustle (Anna mentally
undressed the woman, and was appalled at her hideousness), and a
little girl laughing affectedly, ran down the platform.

"Katerina Andreevna, she's got them all, ma tante!" cried the girl.

"Even the child's hideous and affected," thought Anna. To avoid
seeing anyone, she got up quickly and seated herself at the opposite
window of the empty carriage. A misshapen-looking peasant covered with
dirt, in a cap from which his tangled hair stuck out all around,
passed by that window, stooping down to the carriage wheels.
"There's something familiar about that hideous peasant," thought Anna.
And remembering her dream, she moved away to the opposite door,
shaking with terror. The conductor opened the door and let in a man
and his wife.

"Do you wish to get out?"

Anna made no answer. The conductor and her two fellow passengers did
not notice under her veil her panic-stricken face. She went back to
her corner and sat down. The couple seated themselves on the
opposite side, and intently but surreptitiously scrutinized her
clothes. Both husband and wife seemed repulsive to Anna. The husband
asked if she would allow him to smoke, obviously not with a view to
smoking, but to getting into conversation with her. Receiving her
assent, he said to his wife in French something about caring less to
smoke than to talk. They made inane and affected remarks to one
another, entirely for her benefit. Anna saw clearly that they were
sick of each other, and hated each other. And no one could have helped
hating such miserable monstrosities.

A second bell sounded, and was followed by moving of luggage, noise,
shouting and laughter. It was so clear to Anna that there was
nothing for anyone to be glad of, that this laughter irritated her
agonizingly, and she would have liked to stop up her ears not to
hear it. At last the third bell rang, there was a whistle and a hiss
of steam, and a clank of chains, and the man in her carriage crossed
himself. "It would be interesting to ask him what meaning he
attaches to that," thought Anna, looking angrily at him. She looked
past the lady out of the window at the people who seemed whirling
by, as they ran beside the train or stood on the platform. The
train, jerking at regular intervals at the junctions of the rails,
rolled by the platform, past a stone wall, a signal box, past other
trains; the wheels, moving more smoothly and evenly, resounded with
a slight clang on the rails. The window was lighted up by the bright
evening sun, and a slight breeze fluttered the curtain. Anna forgot
her fellow passengers, and to the light swaying of the train she
fell to thinking again, as she breathed the fresh air.

"Yes, what did I stop at? That I couldn't find a condition in
which life would not be a misery, that we are all created to be
miserable, and that we all know it, and all invent means of
deceiving each other. And when one sees the truth, what is one to do?"

"That's why reason is given to man, to escape from what worries
him," said the lady in French, lisping affectedly, and obviously
pleased with her phrase.

The words seemed an answer to Anna's thoughts.

"To escape from what worries him," repeated Anna. And glancing at
the red-cheeked husband and the thin wife, she saw that the sickly
wife considered herself misunderstood, and the husband deceived her
and encouraged her in that idea of herself. Anna seemed to see all
their history and all the crannies of their souls, turning a light
upon them, as it were. But there was nothing interesting in them,
and she pursued her thought.

"Yes, I'm very much worried, and that's why reason was given me,
to escape; so then, one must escape: why not put out the light when
there's nothing more to look at, when it's sickening to look at it
all? But how? Why did the conductor run along the footboard, why are
they shrieking, those young men in that train? Why are they talking,
why are they laughing? It's all falsehood, all lying, all humbug,
all cruelty!..."

When the train came into the station, Anna got out into the crowd of
passengers, and moving apart from them as if they were lepers, she
stood on the platform, trying to think what she had come here for, and
what she meant to do. Everything that had seemed to her possible
before was now so difficult to consider, especially in this noisy
crowd of hideous people who would not leave her alone. At one moment
porters ran up to her proffering their services, then young men
clacking their heels on the planks of the platform and talking loudly,
stared at her, then people meeting her dodged past on the wrong
side. Remembering that she had meant to go on farther if there was
no answer, she stopped a porter and asked if her coachman were not
here with a note from Count Vronsky.

"Count Vronsky? They sent up here from the Vronskys just this
minute, to meet Princess Sorokina and her daughter. And what is the
coachman like?"

Just as she was talking to the porter, the coachman Mikhail, red and
cheerful in his smart blue coat and chain, evidently proud of having
so successfully performed his commission, came up to her and gave
her a letter. She broke it open, and her heart ached before she had
read it.

"I am very sorry your note did not reach me. I will be home at ten,"
Vronsky had written carelessly.

"Yes, that's what I expected!" she said to herself with an evil
smile.

"Very good, you can go home now," she said softly, addressing
Mikhail. She spoke softly because the rapidity of her heart's
beating hindered her breathing. "No, I won't let Thee make me
miserable," she thought menacingly, addressing not him, not herself,
but the power that made her suffer, and she walked along the platform.

Two maidservants walking along the platform turned their heads,
staring at her and making some remarks about her dress. "Real," they
said of the lace she was wearing. The young men would not leave her in
peace. Again they passed by, peering into her face, and with a laugh
shouting something in an unnatural voice. The stationmaster coming
up asked her whether she was going by the train. A boy selling kvass
never took his eyes off her. "My God! Where am I to go?" she
thought, going farther and farther along the platform. At the end
she stopped. Some ladies and children, who had come to meet a
gentleman in spectacles, paused in their loud laughter and talking,
and stared at her as she reached them. She quickened her pace and
walked away from them to the edge of the platform. A goods train was
coming in. The platform began to sway, and she fancied she was in
the train again.

And all at once she thought of the man crushed by the train the
day she had first met Vronsky, and she knew what she had to do. With a
rapid, light step she went down the steps that led from the platform
to the rails and stopped quite near the approaching train. She
looked at the lower part of the carriages, at the screws and chains,
and the tall cast-iron wheel of the first carriage slowly moving up,
and tried to measure the middle between the front and back wheels, and
the very minute when that middle point would be opposite her.

"There," she said to herself, looking into the shadow of the
carriage, at the sand and coal dust which covered the sleepers-
"there, in the very middle, and I will punish him and escape from
everyone and from myself."

She tried to fling herself below the wheels of the first car as it
reached her; but the red bag which she tried to drop out of her hand
delayed her, and she was too late; she missed the middle of the car.
She had to wait for the next one. A feeling such as she had known when
about to take the first plunge in bathing came upon her, and she
crossed herself. That familiar gesture of crossing brought back into
her soul a whole series of girlish and childish memories, and suddenly
the darkness that had covered everything for her was torn apart, and
life rose up before her for an instant with all its bright past
joys. But she did not take her eyes from the wheels of the second car.
And exactly at the moment when the space between the wheels came
opposite her, she dropped the red bag, and drawing her head back
into her shoulders, fell on her hands under the car, and lightly, as
though she would rise again at once, dropped onto her knees. And at
the same instant she was terror-stricken at what she was doing. "Where
am I? What am I doing? What for?" She tried to get up, to drop
backward; but something huge and merciless struck her on the head
and drew along on her back. "Lord, forgive me all!" she said,
feeling it impossible to struggle. A peasant, muttering something, was
working at the iron. And the candle by which she had been reading
the book filled with troubles, falsehoods, sorrow, and evil, flared up
more brightly than ever before, lighted up for her all that had been
in darkness, sputtered, began to grow dim, and was quenched forever.

                       PART EIGHT


                           I.


Almost two months had passed. The hot summer was half over, but
Sergei Ivanovich was only just preparing to leave Moscow.

Sergei Ivanovich's life had not been uneventful during this time.
A year ago he had finished his book, the fruit of six years' labor. An
Inquiry Concerning the Principles and Forms of Government in Europe
and Russia. Several sections of this book and its introduction had
appeared in periodical publications, and other parts had been read
by Sergei Ivanovich to persons of his circle, so that the leading
ideas of the work could not be entirely novel to the public. But
still, Sergei Ivanovich had expected that on its appearance his book
would be sure to make a serious impression on society, and if it did
not cause a revolution in social science it would, at any rate, make a
great stir in the scientific world.

After the most conscientious revision the book had last year been
published, and had been distributed among the booksellers.

Though he asked no one about it, reluctantly and with feigned
indifference answered his friends' inquiries as to how the book was
going, and did not even inquire of the booksellers how the book was
selling, Sergei Ivanovich was all on the alert, with strained
attention, watching for the first impression his book would make in
the world and in literature.

But a week passed, a second, a third, and in society no impression
whatever could be detected. Those of his friends, who were specialists
and savants, occasionally- unmistakably from politeness- alluded to
it. The rest of his acquaintances, not interested in a book on a
learned subject, did not talk of it at all. And society generally-
just now especially absorbed in other things- was absolutely
indifferent. In the press, too, for a whole month there was not a word
about his book.

Sergei Ivanovich had calculated to a nicety the time necessary for
writing a review, but a month passed, and a second, and still there
was silence.

Only in the Northern Beetle, in a comic article on the singer
Drabanti, who had lost his voice, there was a contemptuous allusion to
Koznishev's book, suggesting that the book had been long ago seen
through by everyone, and was a subject of general ridicule.

At last, in the third month, a critical article appeared in a
serious review. Sergei Ivanovich knew the author of the article. He
had met him once at Golubtsov's.

The author of the article was a young man, an invalid, very bold
as a writer, but extremely deficient in breeding and shy in personal
relations.

In spite of his absolute contempt for the author, it was with
complete respect that Sergei Ivanovich set about reading the
article. The article was awful.

The critic had undoubtedly put an interpretation upon the book which
could not possibly be put on it. But he had selected quotations so
adroitly that for people who had not read the book (and obviously
scarcely anyone had read it) it seemed absolutely clear that the whole
book was nothing but a medley of high-flown phrases, not even- as
suggested by marks of interrogation- used appropriately, and that
the author of the book was a person absolutely without knowledge of
the subject. And all this was so wittily done that Sergei Ivanovich
would not have disowned such wit himself. But that was just what was
so awful.

In spite of the scrupulous conscientiousness with which Sergei
Ivanovich verified the correctness of the critic's arguments, he did
not for a minute stop to ponder over the faults and mistakes which
were ridiculed; but unconsciously he began immediately trying to
recall every detail of his meeting and conversation with the author of
the article.

"Didn't I offend him in some way?" Sergei Ivanovich wondered.

And remembering that when they met he had corrected the young man
about something he had said that betrayed ignorance, Sergei
Ivanovich found the explanation for the trend of the article.

This article was followed by a deadly silence about the book both in
the press and in conversation, and Sergei Ivanovich saw that his six
years' task, toiled at with such love and labor, had gone, leaving
no trace.

Sergei Ivanovich's position was still more difficult from the fact
that, since he had finished his book, he had had more literary work to
do, such as had hitherto occupied the greater part of his time.

Sergei Ivanovich was clever, cultivated healthy and energetic, and
he did not know what use to make of his energy. Conversations in
drawing rooms, in meetings, assemblies, and committees- everywhere
where talk was possible- took up part of his time. But being used
for years to town life, he did not waste all his energies in talk,
as his less experienced younger brother did, when he was in Moscow. He
had a great deal of leisure and intellectual energy still to dispose
of.

Fortunately for him, at this period so difficult for him because
of the failure of his book, the various public questions of the
dissenting sects, of the American Friends, of the Samara famine, of
exhibition, and of spiritualism, were definitely replaced in public
interest by the Slavonic question, which had hitherto rather languidly
interested society, and Sergei Ivanovich, who had been one of the
first to raise this subject, threw himself into it heart and soul.

In the circle to which Sergei Ivanovich belonged, nothing was talked
of or written about just now but the Servian war. Everything that
the idle crowd usually does to kill time was done now for the
benefit of the Slavonic peoples. Balls, concerts, dinners, speeches,
ladies' dresses, beer, taverns- everything testified to sympathy
with the Slavonic peoples.

From much of what was spoken and written on the subject, Sergei
Ivanovich differed on various points. He saw that the Slavonic
question had become one of those fashionable distractions which
succeed one another in providing society with an object and an
occupation. He saw, too, that a great many people were taking up the
subject from motives of self-interest and self-advertisement. He
recognized that the newspapers published a great deal that was
superfluous and exaggerated, with the sole aim of attracting attention
and talking one another down. He saw that in this general movement
those who thrust themselves most forward and shouted the loudest
were men who had failed and were smarting under a sense of injury-
generals without armies, ministers not in the ministry, journalists
not on any paper, party leaders without followers. He saw that there
was a great deal in it that was frivolous and absurd. But he saw and
recognized an unmistakable growing enthusiasm, uniting all classes,
with which it was impossible not to sympathize. The massacre of men
who were fellow Christians, and of the same Slavonic race, excited
sympathy for the sufferers and indignation against the oppressors. And
the heroism of the Servians and Montenegrins struggling for a great
cause begot in the whole people a longing to help their brothers not
in word but in deed.

But in this there was another aspect that made Sergei Ivanovich
rejoice. That was the manifestation of public opinion. The public
had definitely expressed its desire. The soul of the people had, as
Sergei Ivanovich said, found expression. And the more he worked in
this cause, the more incontestable it seemed to him that it was a
cause destined to assume vast dimensions, to create an epoch.

He threw himself heart and soul into the service of this great
cause, and forgot to think about his book.

His whole time now was engrossed by it, so that he could scarcely
manage to answer all the letters and appeals addressed to him.

He worked the whole spring and part of the summer, and it was only
in July that he prepared to go away to his brother's country place.

He was going both to rest for a fortnight, and in the very heart
of the people, in the farthest wilds of the country, to enjoy the
sight of that uplifting of the spirit of the people, of which, like
all residents in the capital and big towns, he was fully persuaded.
Katavassov had long intended to carry out his promise to stay with
Levin, and so he was going with him.

                           II.


Sergei Ivanovich and Katavassov had just reached the station of
the Kursk line, which was particularly busy and full of people that
day, when, looking round for the groom who was following with their
things, they saw a party of volunteers driving up in four cabs. Ladies
met them with bouquets of flowers, and, followed by the rushing crowd,
they went into the station.

One of the ladies who had met the volunteers, came out of the hall
and addressed Sergei Ivanovich.

"You also come to see them off?" she asked in French.

"No, I'm going away myself, Princess. To my brother's for a holiday.
Do you always see them off?" said Sergei Ivanovich with a barely
perceptible smile.

"Oh, that would be impossible!" answered the Princess. "Is it true
that eight hundred have been sent from us already? Malvinsky
wouldn't believe me."

"More than eight hundred. If you reckon those who have been sent not
directly from Moscow, over a thousand," answered Sergei Ivanovich.

"There! That's just what I said!" exclaimed the lady joyously.
"And it's true too, I suppose, that about a million has been
subscribed?"

"Yes, Princess."

"What do you say to today's telegram? The Turks have been
overwhelmed again."

"Yes, so I saw," answered Sergei Ivanovich. They were speaking of
the last telegram stating that the Turks had been for three days in
succession beaten at all points and put to flight, and that tomorrow a
decisive engagement was expected.

"Ah, by the way, a splendid young fellow has asked leave to go,
and they've made some difficulty- I don't know why. I meant to ask
you; I know him; please write a note about his case. He's being sent
by Countess Lidia Ivanovna."

Sergei Ivanovich asked for all the details the Princess knew about
the young man, and, going into the first-class waiting room, wrote a
note to the person on whom the granting of leave of absence
depended, and handed it to the Princess.

"You know Count Vronsky, the notorious one... is going by this
train?" said the Princess with a smile full of triumph and meaning,
when he found her again and gave her the letter.

"I had heard he was going, but I did not know when. By this train?"

"I've seen him. He's here: there's only his mother seeing him off.
It's the best thing, anyway, that he could do."

"Oh, yes, of course."

While they were talking the crowd streamed by them toward the dining
table. They went forward too, and heard a gentleman with a glass in
his hand delivering a loud discourse to the volunteers. "In the
service of religion, humanity, and our brethren," the gentleman
said, his voice growing louder and louder; "to this great cause mother
Moscow dedicates you with her blessing. Jivio!" he concluded,
concluded, loudly and tearfully.

Everyone shouted Jivio! and a fresh crowd dashed into the hall,
almost carrying the Princess off her feet.

"Ah, Princess! That was something like!" said Stepan Arkadyevich,
suddenly appearing in the midst of the crowd and beaming upon them
with a delighted smile. "Capitally, warmly said, wasn't it? Bravo! And
Sergei Ivanovich! Why, you ought to have said something- just a few
words, you know, to encourage them; you do that so well," he added
with a soft, respectful, and discreet smile, moving Sergei Ivanovich
forward a little by the arm.

"No, I'm just off."

"Where to?"

"To the country, to my brother's," answered Sergei Ivanovich.

"Then you'll see my wife. I've written to her, but you'll see her
first. Please tell her that they've seen me and that it's 'all right,'
as the English say. She'll understand. Oh, and be so good as to tell
her I'm appointed member of the committee.... But she'll understand!
You know, les petites misires de la vie humaine," he said, as it
were apologizing to the Princess. "And Princess Miaghkaia- not Liza,
but Bibish- is sending a thousand guns and twelve nurses, after all.
Did I tell you?"

"Yes, I heard so," answered Koznishev indifferently.

"It's a pity you're going away," said Stepan Arkadyevich.
"Tomorrow we're giving a dinner to two who are setting off-
Dimer-Biartniansky from Peterburg and our Veslovsky, Grisha. They're
both going. Veslovsky's only lately married. There's a fine fellow for
you! Eh, Princess?" he turned to the lady.

The Princess looked at Koznishev without replying. But the fact that
Sergei Ivanovich and the Princess seemed anxious to get rid of him did
not in the least disconcert Stepan Arkadyevich. Smiling, he stared
at the feather in the Princess's hat, and then about him as though
he were going to pick something up. Seeing a lady approaching with a
collection box, he beckoned her up and put in a five-rouble note.

"I can never see these collection boxes unmoved while I've money
in my pocket," he said. "And how about today's telegram? Fine chaps
those Montenegrins!"

"You don't say so!" he cried, when the Princess told him that
Vronsky was going by this train. For an instant Stepan Arkadyevich's
face looked sad, but a minute later, when, stroking his whiskers and
swinging as he walked, he went into the hall where Vronsky was, he had
completely forgotten his own despairing sobs over his sister's corpse,
and he saw in Vronsky only a hero and an old friend.

"With all his faults one can't refuse to do him justice," said the
Princess to Sergei Ivanovich, as soon as Stepan Arkadyevich had left
them. "What a typically Russian, Slav nature! Only, I'm afraid it
won't be pleasant for Vronsky to see him. Say what you will, I'm
touched by that man's fate. Do talk to him a little on the way,"
said the Princess.

"Yes, perhaps, if the occasion arises."

"I never liked him. But this atones for a great deal. He's not
merely going himself- he's taking a squadron at his own expense."

"Yes, so I heard."

A bell sounded. Everyone crowded to the doors.

"Here he is!" said the Princess, indicating Vronsky, who, with his
mother on his arm walked by, wearing a long overcoat and
wide-brimmed black hat. Oblonsky was walking beside him, talking
eagerly of something.

Vronsky was frowning and looking straight before him, as though he
did not hear what Stepan Arkadyevich was saying.

Probably on Oblonsky's pointing them out, he looked round in the
direction where the Princess and Sergei Ivanovich were standing,
and, without speaking, lifted his hat. His face, aged and worn by
suffering, looked stony.

Going onto the platform, Vronsky left his mother and disappeared
into a compartment.

On the platform there rang out "God save the Czar," then shouts of
"Hurrah!" and "Jivio!" One of the volunteers, a tall, very young man
with a hollow chest, was particularly conspicuous, bowing and waving
his felt hat and a nosegay over his head. Then two officers emerged,
bowing too, and a stout man with a big beard, wearing a greasy
forage cap.

                           III.


Having said good-by to the Princess, Sergei Ivanovich was joined
by Katavassov; together they got into a carriage full to
overflowing, and the train started.

At Czaritsino station the train was met by a chorus of young men
singing "Hail to Thee!" Again the volunteers bowed and poked their
heads out, but Sergei Ivanovich paid no attention to them. He had
had so much to do with the volunteers that the type was familiar to
him and did not interest him. Katavassov, whose scientific work had
prevented his having a chance of observing them hitherto, was very
much interested in them and questioned Sergei Ivanovich.

Sergei Ivanovich advised him to go into the second class and talk to
them himself. At the next station Katavassov acted on this suggestion.

At the first stop he moved into the second class and made the
acquaintance of the volunteers. They were sitting in a corner of the
carriage, talking loudly and obviously aware that the attention of the
passengers, and of Katavassov, as he got in, was concentrated upon
them. More loudly than all talked the tall, hollow-chested young
man. He was unmistakably tipsy, and was relating some story that had
occurred at his school. Facing him sat a middle-aged officer in the
Austrian military jacket of the Guards' uniform. He was listening with
a smile to the hollow-chested youth, and occasionally pulling him
up. The third, in an artillery uniform, was sitting on a portmanteau
beside them. A fourth was asleep.

Entering into conversation with the youth, Katavassov learned that
he was a wealthy Moscow merchant who had run through a large fortune
before he was two-and-twenty. Katavassov did not like him, because
he was unmanly and effeminate and sickly. He was obviously
convinced, especially now after drinking, that he was performing a
heroic action, and he bragged of it in the most unpleasant way.

The second, the retired officer, made an unpleasant impression too
upon Katavassov. He was, it seemed, a man who had tried everything. He
had been on a railway, had been a land steward, and had started
factories, and he talked, quite without necessity, of everything,
and used learned expressions quite inappropriately.

The third, the artilleryman, on the contrary, struck Katavassov very
favorably. He was a quiet, modest fellow, unmistakably impressed by
the knowledge of the officer and the heroic self-sacrifice of the
merchant, and saying nothing about himself. When Katavassov asked
him what had impelled him to go to Servia, he answered modestly:

"Oh, well, everyone's going. The Servians want help, too. I'm
sorry for them."

"Yes, you artillerymen are especially scarce there," said
Katavassov.

"Oh, I wasn't long in the artillery; maybe they'll put me into the
infantry or the cavalry."

"Into the infantry, when they need artillery more than anything?"
said Katavassov, fancying from the artilleryman's apparent age that he
must have reached a fairly high grade.

"I wasn't long in the artillery; I'm a junker, in reserve," he said,
and he began to explain how he had failed in his examination.

All of this together made a disagreeable impression on Katavassov,
and when the volunteers got out at a station for a drink, Katavassov
would have liked to compare his unfavorable impression in conversation
with someone. There was an old man in the carriage, wearing a military
overcoat, who had been listening all the while to Katavassov's
conversation with the volunteers. When they were left alone,
Katavassov addressed him.

"What different positions they come from, all those fellows who
are going off there," Katavassov said vaguely, not wishing to
express his own opinion, and at the same time anxious to find out
the old man's views.

The old man was an officer who had served in two campaigns. He
knew what makes a soldier, and, judging by the appearance and the talk
of those persons, by the swagger with which they had recourse to the
bottle on the journey, he considered them poor soldiers. Moreover,
he lived in a district town, and he was longing to tell how one
soldier had volunteered from his town, a drunkard and a thief whom
no one would employ as a laborer. But knowing by experience that in
the present condition of the public temper it was dangerous to express
an opinion opposed to the general one, and especially to criticize the
volunteers unfavorably, he too watched Katavassov without committing
himself.

"Well, men are wanted there," he said, laughing with his eyes. And
they fell to talking of the last war news, and each concealed from the
other his perplexity as to the engagement expected next day, since the
Turks had been beaten, according to the latest news, all along the
line. And so they parted, neither giving expression to his opinion.

Katavassov went back to his own carriage, and with reluctant
hypocrisy reported to Sergei Ivanovich his observations of the
volunteers, from which it would appear that they were capital fellows.

At a big station at a town the volunteers were again greeted with
shouts and singing, again men and women with collection boxes
appeared, and provincial ladies brought bouquets to the volunteers and
followed them into the refreshment room; but all this was on a much
smaller and feebler scale than in Moscow.

                           IV.


While the train was stopping at the provincial town, Sergei
Ivanovich did not go to the refreshment room, but walked up and down
the platform.

The first time he passed Vronsky's compartment he noticed that the
curtain was drawn over the window; but as he passed it the second time
he saw the old Countess at the window. She beckoned to Koznishev.

"I'm going, you see- taking him as far as Kursk," she said.

"Yes, so I heard," said Sergei Ivanovich, standing at her window and
peeping in. "What a noble act on his part!" he added, noticing that
Vronsky was not in the compartment.

"Yes, after his misfortune, what was there for him to do?"

"What a terrible thing it was!" said Sergei Ivanovich.

"Ah, what I have been through! But do get in.... Ah, what I have
been through!" she repeated, when Sergei Ivanovich had got in and
sat down beside her. "You can't conceive it! For six weeks he did
not speak to anyone, and would not touch food except when I implored
him. And not for one minute could we leave him alone. We took away
everything he could have used against himself. We lived on the
ground floor, but there was no reckoning on anything. You know, of
course, that he had shot himself once already on her account," she
said, and the old lady's brows contracted at the recollection. "Yes,
hers was the fitting end for such a woman. Even the death she chose
was low and vulgar."

"It's not for us to judge, Countess," said Sergei Ivanovich sighing;
"but I can understand that it has been very hard for you."

"Ah, don't speak of it! I was staying on my estate, and he was
with me. A note was brought him. He wrote an answer and sent it off.
We hadn't an idea that she was close by at the station. In the evening
I had only just gone to my room, when my Mary told me a lady had
thrown herself under the train. Something seemed to strike me at once.
I knew it was she. The first thing I said was that he was not to be
told. But they'd told him already. His coachman was there and saw it
all. When I ran into his room, he was beside himself- it was frightful
to see him. He didn't say a word, but galloped off there. I don't know
to this day what happened there, but he was brought back at death's
door. I shouldn't have known him. Prostration complete, the doctor
said. And that was followed almost by madness. Oh, why talk of it!"
said the Countess with a wave of her hand. "It was an awful time!
No, say what you will, she was a bad woman. Why, what is the meaning
of such desperate passions? It was all to show herself something out
of the ordinary. Well, and that she did do. She brought herself to
ruin and two good men- her husband, and my unhappy son."

"And what did her husband do?" asked Sergei Ivanovich.

"He has taken her daughter. Aliosha was ready to agree to anything
at first. Now it worries him terribly that he should have given his
own child away to another man. But he can't take back his word.
Karenin came to the funeral. But we tried to prevent his meeting
Aliosha. For him, for her husband, it was easier, anyway. She had
set him free. But my poor son was utterly given up to her. He had
thrown up everything, his career, me, and even then she had no mercy
on him, but of set purpose she made his ruin complete. No, say what
you will, her very death was the death of a vile woman, of no
religious feeling. God forgive me, but I can't help hating the
memory of her, when I look at my son's misery!"

"But how is he now?"

"It was a blessing from Providence for us- this Servian war. I'm
old, and I don't understand the rights and wrongs of it, but it's come
as a providential blessing to him. Of course for me, as his mother,
it's terrible; and what's worse, they say, ce n'est pas tres bien vu a
Petersbourg. But it can't be helped! It was the one thing that could
rouse him. Iashvin- a friend of his- he had lost all he had at cards
and he was going to Servia. He came to see him and persuaded him to
go. Now it's an interest for him. Do please talk to him a little. I
want to distract his mind. He's so low-spirited. And, as bad luck
would have it, he has toothache too. But he'll be delighted to see
you. Please do talk to him; he's walking up and down on that side."

Sergei Ivanovich said he would be very glad to, and crossed over
to the other side of the station.

                           V.


In the slanting evening shadows cast by the baggage piled up on
the platform, Vronsky in his long overcoat and slouch hat, with his
hands in his pockets, strode up and down, like a wild beast in a cage,
turning sharply every twenty paces. Sergei Ivanovich fancied, as he
approached him, that Vronsky saw him but was pretending not to see.
This did not affect Sergei Ivanovich in the slightest. He was above
all personal considerations with Vronsky.

At that moment Sergei Ivanovich looked upon Vronsky as a man
taking an important part in a great cause, and Koznishev thought it
his duty to encourage him and express his approval. He went up to him.

Vronsky stood still, looked intently at him, recognized him, and
going a few steps forward to meet him, shook hands with him very
warmly.

"Possibly you didn't wish to see me," said Sergei Ivanovich, "but
couldn't I be of use to you?"

"There's no one I should less dislike seeing than you," said
Vronsky. "Forgive me. There's nothing in life for me to like."

"I quite understand, and I merely meant to offer you my services,"
said Sergei Ivanovich, scanning Vronsky's face, full of unmistakable
suffering. "Wouldn't it be of use to you to have a letter to
Ristich, to Milan?"

"Oh, no!" Vronsky said, seeming to understand him with difficulty.
"If you don't mind, let's walk on. It's so stuffy among the cars. A
letter? No, thank you; to meet death one needs no letters of
introduction. The Turks take..." he said, with a smile that was merely
of the lips. His eyes still kept their look of angry suffering.

"Yes; but you might find it easier to get into relations, which
are after all essential, with anyone prepared to see you. But that's
as you like. I was very glad to hear of your intention. There have
been so many attacks made on the volunteers, and a man like you raises
them in public estimation."

"My use as a man," said Vronsky, "is that life's worth nothing to
me. And that I've enough bodily energy to cut my way into their ranks,
and to trample on them or fall- I know that. I'm glad there's
something to give my life for, for it's not simply useless but
loathsome to me. Anyone's welcome to it." And his jaw twitched
impatiently from the incessant nagging toothache, that prevented him
from even speaking with a natural expression.

"You will become another man, I predict," said Sergei Ivanovich,
feeling touched. "To deliver one's brethren from bondage is an aim
worth death and life. God grant you success outwardly- and inwardly
peace," he added, and he held out his hand.

Vronsky warmly squeezed his outstretched hand.

"Yes, as a weapon I may be of some use. But as a man, I'm a
wreck," he jerked out.

He could hardly speak for the throbbing ache in his strong tooth,
his mouth being filled up with saliva. He was silent, and his eyes
rested on the wheels of the tender, slowly and smoothly rolling
along the rails.

And all at once a different pain, not an ache, but an inner trouble,
that set his whole being in anguish, made him for an instant forget
his toothache. As he glanced at the tender and the rails, under the
influence of the conversation with a friend he had not met since his
misfortune, he suddenly recalled her- that is, what was left of her
when he had run like one distraught into the barrack of the railway
station: on the table, shamelessly sprawling out among strangers,
the bloodstained body so lately full of life; the head unhurt dropping
back with its weight of hair, and the curling tresses about the
temples, and the exquisite face, with red, half-opened mouth, the
strange, fixed expression, piteous on the lips and awful in the
still open eyes, that seemed to utter that fearful phrase- that he
would be sorry for it- which she had said when they were quarreling.

And he tried to think of her as she was when he met her the first
time, at a railway station too, mysterious, exquisite, loving, seeking
and giving happiness, and not cruelly revengeful as he remembered
her at that last moment. He tried to recall his best moments with her,
but those moments were poisoned forever. He could only think of her as
triumphant, successful in her menace of a wholly useless remorse,
never to be effaced. He lost all consciousness of toothache, and his
face worked with sobs.

Passing twice up and down beside the baggage in silence and
regaining his self-possession, he addressed Sergei Ivanovich calmly:

"You have had no telegrams since yesterday's? Yes, driven back for a
third time, but a decisive engagement expected for tomorrow."

And after talking a little more of the proclaiming of Milan as King,
and the immense effect this might have, they parted, going to their
cars on hearing the second bell.

                           VI.


Sergei Ivanovich had not telegraphed to his brother to send to
meet him, as he did not know when he should be able to leave Moscow.
Levin was not at home when Katavassov and Sergei Ivanovich, in a
wagonette hired at the station, drove up to the steps of the
Pokrovskoe house, as black as Negroes from the dust of the road.
Kitty, sitting on the balcony with her father and sister, recognized
her brother-in-law, and ran down to meet him.

"What a shame not to have let us know," she said, giving her hand to
Sergei Ivanovich, and putting her forehead up for him to kiss.

"We drove here capitally, and have not put you out," answered Sergei
Ivanovich. "I'm so dirty. I'm afraid to touch you. I've been so
busy, I didn't know when I should be able to tear myself away. And
so you're still as ever enjoying your peaceful, quiet happiness," he
said, smiling, "out of the reach of the current in your peaceful
backwater. Here's our friend Fiodor Vassilievich, successful in
getting here at last."

"But I'm not a Negro; I shall look like a human being when I
wash," said Katavassov in his jesting fashion, and he shook hands
and smiled, his teeth flashing white in his black face.

"Kostia will be delighted. He has gone to his grange. It's time he
should be home."

"Busy as ever with his farming. It really is a peaceful
backwater," said Katavassov; "while we in town think of nothing but
the Servian war. Well, how does our friend look at it? He's sure not
to think like other people."

"Oh, I don't know, he's like everybody else," Kitty answered, a
little embarrassed, looking round at Sergei Ivanovich. "I'll send to
fetch him. Papa's staying with us. He's only just come home from
abroad."

And making arrangements to send for Levin and for the guests to
wash, one in his room and the other in what had been Dolly's, and
giving orders for their luncheon, Kitty ran out on the balcony,
enjoying the freedom and rapidity of movement, of which she had been
deprived during the months of her pregnancy.

"It's Sergei Ivanovich and Katavassov, a professor," she said.

"Oh, it's hard in such a heat," said the Prince.

"No, papa, he's very nice, and Kostia's very fond of him," Kitty
said, with a deprecating smile, noticing the irony on her father's
face.

"Oh, I didn't say anything."

"You go to them, darling," said Kitty to her sister, "and
entertain them. They saw Stiva at the station; he was quite well.
And I must run to Mitia. As ill luck would have it, I haven't fed
him since tea. He's awake now, and sure to be screaming." And, feeling
a rush of milk, she hurried to the nursery.

This was not a mere guess; her connection with the child was still
so close that she could gauge by the flow of her milk his need of
food, and knew for certain he was hungry.

She knew he was crying before she reached the nursery. And he was
indeed crying. She heard him and hastened. But the faster she went the
louder he screamed. It was a fine healthy scream, hungry and
impatient.

"Has he been screaming long, nurse- very long?" said Kitty,
hurriedly seating herself on a chair, and preparing to give the baby
the breast. "But give me him quickly. Oh, nurse, how tiresome you are!
There, tie the cap afterward, do!"

The baby's greedy scream was passing into sobs.

"But you can't manage so, ma'am," said Agathya Mikhailovna, who
was almost always to be found in the nursery. "He must be put
straight. A-oo! A-oo!" she chanted over him, paying no attention to
the mother.

The nurse brought the baby to his mother. Agathya Mikhailovna
followed him with a face melting with tenderness.

"He knows me, he knows me. In God's faith, Katerina Alexandrovna,
ma'am, he recognized me!" Agathya Mikhailovna cried above the baby's
screams.

But Kitty did not hear her words. Her impatience kept growing,
like the baby's.

Their impatience hindered things for a while. The baby could not get
hold of the breast right, and was furious.

At last, after despairing, breathless screaming, and vain sucking,
things went right, and mother and child felt simultaneously soothed,
and both subsided into calm.

"But poor darling, he's all in perspiration!" said Kitty in a
whisper, touching the baby. "What makes you think he knows you?" she
added, with a sidelong glance at the baby's eyes, that peered
roguishly, as she fancied, from under his cap, at his rhythmically
puffing cheeks, and the little red-palmed hand he was waving.

"Impossible! If he knew anyone, he would have known me," said Kitty,
in response to Agathya Mikhailovna's statement, and she smiled.

She smiled because, though she said he could not know her, in her
heart she was sure that he knew not merely Agathya Mikhailovna, but
that he knew and understood everything, and knew and understood a
great deal too that no one else knew, and that she, his mother, had
learned and come to understand only through him. To Agathya
Mikhailovna, to the nurse, to his grandfather, to his father even,
Mitia was a living being, requiring only material care, but for his
mother he had long been a moral being, with whom there had been a
whole series of spiritual relations already.

"When he wakes up, please God, you shall see for yourself. Then when
I do like this, he simply beams on me, the darling! Simply beams
like a sunny day!" said Agathya Mikhailovna.

"Well, well; then we shall see," whispered Kitty. "But now go
away, he's going to sleep."

                           VII.


Agathya Mikhailovna went out on tiptoe; the nurse let down the
blind, chased flies out from under the muslin canopy of the crib,
and a hornet struggling on the window frame, and sat down waving a
faded branch of birch over the mother and the baby.

"How hot it is! If God would send a drop of rain," she said.

"Yes, yes, sh- sh- sh-" was all Kitty answered, rocking a little,
and tenderly squeezing the plump little arm, with rolls of fat at
the wrist, which Mitia still waved feebly as he opened and shut his
eyes. That hand worried Kitty; she longed to kiss the little hand, but
was afraid to for fear of waking the baby. At last the little hand
ceased waving, and the eyes closed. Only from time to time, as he went
on sucking, the baby raised his long, curly eyelashes and peeped at
his mother with humid eyes, that looked black in the twilight. The
nurse had left off fanning, and was dozing. From above came the
peals of the old Prince's voice, and the chuckle of Katavassov.

"They have got into talk, without me," thought Kitty, "but still
it's vexing that Kostia's out. He's sure to have gone to the
beehouse again. Though, it's a pity he's there so often, still I'm
glad. It distracts his mind. He's become altogether happier and better
now than in the spring. He used to be so gloomy and worried that I
felt frightened for him. And how absurd he is!" she whispered,
smiling.

She knew what worried her husband. It was his unbelief. Although, if
she had been asked whether she supposed that in the future life, if he
did not believe, he would be damned, she would have had to admit
that he would be damned, his unbelief did not cause her unhappiness.
And she, confessing that for an unbeliever there can be no
salvation, and loving her husband's soul more than anything in the
world, thought with a smile of his unbelief, and told herself that
he was absurd.

"What does he keep reading philosophy of some sort for all this
year?" she wondered. "If it's all written in those books, he can
understand them. If it's all wrong, why does he read them? He says
himself that he would like to believe. Then why is it he doesn't
believe? Surely from his thinking so much? And he thinks so much
from being solitary. He's always alone, alone. He can't talk about
it all to us. I fancy he'll be glad of these visitors, especially
Katavassov. He likes discussions with them," she thought, and passed
instantly to the consideration of where it would be more convenient to
put Katavassov, to sleep alone or to share Sergei Ivanovich's room.
And then an idea suddenly struck her, which made her shudder and
even disturb Mitia, who glanced severely at her. "I do believe the
laundress hasn't sent the washing yet, and all the guests' sheets
are in use. If I don't see to it, Agathya Mikhailovna will give Sergei
Ivanovich the used sheets," and at the very idea of this the blood
rushed to Kitty's face.

"Yes, I will arrange it," she decided, and going back to her
former thoughts, she remembered that some spiritual question of
importance had been interrupted, and she began to recall what. "Yes,
Kostia, an unbeliever," she thought again with a smile.

"Well, an unbeliever then! Better let him always be one than like
Madame Stahl, or what I tried to be in those days abroad. No, he won't
ever sham anything."

And a recent instance of his goodness rose vividly to her mind. A
fortnight ago a penitent letter had come from Stepan Arkadyevich to
Dolly. He besought her to save his honor, to sell her estate to pay
his debts. Dolly was in despair, she detested her husband, despised
him, pitied him, resolved on a separation, resolved to refuse, but
ended by agreeing to sell part of her property. After that, with an
irrepressible smile of tenderness, Kitty recalled her husband's
shamefaced embarrassment, his repeated awkward efforts to approach the
subject, and how at last, having thought of the one means of helping
Dolly without wounding her pride, he had suggested to Kitty- what
had not occurred to her before- that she should give up her share of
the property.

"He an unbeliever indeed! With his heart, his dread of offending
anyone, even a child! Everything for others, nothing for himself.
Sergei Ivanovich simply considers it as Kostia's duty to be his
bailiff. And it's the same with his sister. Now Dolly and her children
are under his guardianship; all these peasants who come to him every
day, as though he were bound to be at their service."

"Yes, only be like your father- only like him," she said, handing
Mitia over to the nurse, and putting her lips to his cheek.

                           VIII.


Ever since, by his beloved brother's deathbed, Levin had first
glanced into the questions of life and death in the light of these new
convictions, as he called them, which had during the period from his
twentieth to his thirty-fourth year imperceptibly replaced his
childish and youthful beliefs- he had been stricken with horror, not
so much of death, as of life, without any knowledge of whence, and
why, and how, and what it was. The physical organization, its decay,
the Indestructibility of matter, the law of the conservation of
energy, evolution, were the words which usurped the place of his old
belief. These words and the ideas associated with them were very
well for intellectual purposes. But for life they yielded nothing, and
Levin felt suddenly like a man who has changed his warm fur cloak
for a muslin garment, and going for the first time into the frost is
immediately convinced, not by reason, but by his whole nature, that he
is as good as naked, and that he must infallibly perish miserably.

From that moment, though he did not distinctly face it, and still
went on living as before, Levin had never lost this sense of terror at
his lack of knowledge.

He vaguely felt, too, that what he called his new convictions were
not merely lack of knowledge, but that they were part of a whole order
of ideas, in which no knowledge of what he needed was possible.

At first, marriage, with the new joys and duties bound up with it,
had completely crowded out these thoughts. But of late, while he was
staying in Moscow after his wife's confinement, with nothing to do,
the question that clamored for solution had more and more often,
more and more insistently, haunted Levin's mind.

The question was summed up for him thus: "If I do not accept the
answers Christianity gives to the problems of my life, what answers do
I accept?" And in the whole arsenal of his convictions, so far from
finding any satisfactory answers, he was utterly unable to find
anything at all like an answer.

He was in the position of a man seeking food in toyshops and firearm
shops.

Instinctively, unconsciously, with every book, with every
conversation, with every man he met, he was on the lookout for light
on these questions and their solution.

What puzzled and distracted him above everything was that the
majority of men of his age and circle had, like him, exchanged their
old beliefs for the same new convictions, and yet saw nothing to
lament in this, and were perfectly satisfied and serene. So that,
apart from the principal question, Levin was tortured by other
questions too: were these people sincere? or were they playing a part?
or was it that they understood the answers science gave to these
problems in some different, clearer sense than he did? And he
assiduously studied both these men's opinions and the books which
treated of these scientific explanations.

One fact he had found out since these questions had engrossed his
mind- that he had been quite wrong in supposing, from the
recollections of the university circle of his young days, that
religion had outlived its day, and that it was now practically
nonexistent. All the people nearest to him who were good in their
lives were believers. The old Prince, and Lvov, whom he liked so much,
and Sergei Ivanovich; and all the women believed; and his wife
believed as simply as he had believed in his earliest childhood; and
ninety-nine hundredths of the Russian people, all the people for whose
life he felt the deepest respect, believed.

Another fact of which he became convinced, after reading many books,
was that the men who shared his views had no other construction to put
on them, and that they gave no explanation of the questions which he
felt he could not live without answering, but simply ignored their
existence and attempted to explain other questions of no possible
interest to him, such as the evolution of organisms, the mechanistic
theory of the soul, etc.

Moreover, during his wife's confinement, something had happened that
seemed extraordinary to him. He, an unbeliever, had fallen into
praying, and at the moment he prayed, he believed. But that moment had
passed, and he could not make his state of mind at that moment fit
into the rest of his life.

He could not admit that at that moment he knew the truth, and that
now he was wrong; for as soon as he began thinking calmly about it, it
all fell to pieces. He could not admit that he was mistaken then,
for his spiritual condition then was precious to him, and to admit
that it was a proof of weakness would have been to desecrate those
moments. He was miserably divided against himself, and strained all
his spiritual forces to the utmost to escape from this condition.

                           IX.


These doubts fretted and harassed him, growing weaker or stronger
from time to time, but never leaving him. He read and thought, and the
more he read and the more he thought, the further he felt from the aim
he was pursuing.

Of late in Moscow and in the country, since he had become
convinced that he would find no solution in the materialists, he had
read and reread thoroughly Plato, Spinoza, Kant, Schelling, Hegel, and
Schopenhauer- those philosophers who gave a nonmaterialistic
explanation of life.

Their ideas seemed to him fruitful when he was reading or was
himself seeking arguments to refute other theories, especially those
of the materialists; but as soon as he began to read or sought for
himself a solution of problems, the same thing always happened. As
long as he followed the fixed definition of vague words such as
spirit, will, freedom, substance, purposely letting himself go into
the snare of words the philosophers, or he himself, set for him, he
seemed to comprehend something. But he had only to forget the
artificial train of reasoning, and to turn from life itself to what
had satisfied him while thinking in accordance with the fixed
definitions, and all this artificial edifice fell to pieces at once
like a house of cards, and it became clear that the edifice had been
built up out of those transposed words, apart from a something in life
that was more important than reason.

At one time, reading Schopenhauer, he put in place of his will the
word love, and for a couple of days this new philosophy consoled
him, till he removed away from it. But then, when he turned from
life itself to glance at it again, it fell away too, and proved to
be the same muslin garment with no warmth in it.

His brother Sergei Ivanovich advised him to read the theological
works of Khomiakov. Levin read the second volume of Khomiakov's works,
and in spite of the elegant, epigrammatic, polemic style which at
first repelled him, he was impressed by the doctrine of the church
he found in them. He was struck at first by the idea that the
apprehension of divine truths had not been vouchsafed to man, but to a
corporation of men bound together by love- to Church. What delighted
him was the thought how much easier it was to believe in a still
existing living Church, embracing all the beliefs of men, and having
God at its head, and therefore holy and infallible, and from it to
accept the faith in God, in the creation, the fall, the redemption,
than to begin with God, a mysterious, faraway God, the creation,
etc. But afterward, on reading a Catholic writer's history of the
Church, and then a Greek orthodox writer's history of the Church,
and seeing that the two Churches, in their very conception infallible,
each deny the authority of the other, Khomiakov's doctrine of the
Church lost all its charm for him, and this edifice crumbled into dust
like the philosophers' edifices.

All that spring he was not himself, and went through fearful moments
of horror.

"Without knowing what I am and why I am here, life's impossible; and
that I can't know, and so I can't live," Levin said to himself.

"In infinite time, in infinite matter, in infinite space, is
formed a bubble organism, and that bubble lasts a while and bursts,
and that bubble is Me."

It was an agonizing error, but it was the sole logical result of
ages of human thought in that direction.

This was the ultimate belief on which all the systems elaborated
by human thought, in almost all their ramifications, rested. It was
the prevalent conviction, and of all other explanations Levin had
unconsciously, not knowing when or how, chosen it, as the clearest
at any rate, and made it his own.

But it was not merely a falsehood, it was the cruel jeer of some
wicked power, some evil, hateful power, to whom one could not submit.

He must escape from this power. And the means of escape every man
had in his own hands. He had but to cut short this dependence on evil.
And there was one means- death.

And Levin, a happy father and a man in perfect health, was several
times so near suicide that he hid the cord, lest he be tempted to hang
himself, and was afraid to go out with his gun, for fear of shooting
himself.

But Levin did not shoot himself, and did not hang himself; he went
on living.

                           X.


When Levin thought what he was and what he was living for, he
could find no answer to the questions and was reduced to despair;
but when he left off questioning himself about it, it seemed as though
he knew both what he was and what he was living for, acting and living
resolutely and without hesitation; even in these latter days he was
far more decided and unhesitating in life than he had ever been.

When he went back to the country at the beginning of June, he went
back also to his usual pursuits. His agriculture, his relations with
the peasants and the neighbors, the care of his household, the
management of his sister's and brother's property, of which he had the
direction, his relations with his wife and kindred, the care of his
child, and the new beekeeping hobby he had taken up that spring,
filled all his time.

These things occupied him now, not because he justified them to
himself by any sort of general principles, as he had done in former
days; on the contrary, disappointed by the failure of his former
efforts for the general welfare, and too much occupied with his own
thought and the mass of business with which he was burdened from all
sides, he had completely given up thinking of the general good, and he
busied himself with all this work simply because it seemed to him that
he must do what he was doing- that he could not do otherwise.

In former days- almost from childhood, and increasingly up to full
manhood- when he had tried to do anything that would be good for
all, for humanity, for Russia, for the whole village, he had noticed
that the idea of it had been pleasant, but the work itself had
always been incoherent, that then he had never had a full conviction
of its absolute necessity, and that the work that had begun by seeming
so great, had grown less and less, till it vanished into nothing.
But now, since his marriage, when he had begun to confine himself more
and more to living for himself, though he experienced no delight at
all at the thought of the work he was doing, he felt a complete
conviction of its necessity, saw that it succeeded far better than
in old days, and that it kept on growing more and more.

Now, involuntarily it seemed, he cut more and more deeply into the
soil like a plough, so that he could not be drawn out without
turning aside the furrow.

To live the same family life as his father and forefathers- that is,
in the same condition of culture- and to bring up his children in
the same, was incontestably necessary. It was as necessary as dining
when one was hungry; and to do this, just as it was necessary to
cook dinner, it was necessary to keep the mechanism of agriculture
at Pokrovskoe going so as to yield an income. Just as incontestably as
it was necessary to repay a debt was it necessary to keep the
patrimonial estate in such a condition that his son, when he
received it as a heritage, would say "Thank you" to his father as
Levin had said "Thank you" to the grandfather for all he had built and
planted. And to do this it was necessary to look after the land
himself, not to let it, and to breed cattle, manure the fields, and
plant timber.

It was impossible not to look after the affairs of Sergei Ivanovich,
of his sister, of all the peasants who came to him for advice and were
accustomed to do so- as impossible as to fling down a child one is
carrying in one's arms. It was necessary to look after the comfort
of his sister-in-law and her children, and of his wife and baby, and
it was impossible not to spend with them at least a short time each
day.

And all this, together with shooting and his new beekeeping,
filled up the whole of Levin's life, which had no meaning at all for
him, when he began to think.

But besides knowing thoroughly what he had to do, Levin knew in just
the same way how he had to do it all, and what was of more
importance than the rest.

He knew he must hire laborers as cheaply as possible; but to hire
men under bond, paying them in advance at less than the current rate
of wages, was what he must not do, even though it was very profitable.
Selling straw to the peasants in times of scarcity of provender was
what he might do, even though he felt sorry for them; but the tavern
and the pothouse must be put down, though they were a source of
income. Felling timber must be punished as severely as possible, but
he could not exact forfeits for cattle being driven into his fields;
and though it annoyed the keeper and made the peasants not afraid to
graze their cattle on his land, he could not keep their cattle as a
punishment.

To Piotr, who was paying a moneylender ten per cent a month, he must
lend a sum of money to set him free; but he could not let off peasants
who did not pay their rent, nor let them fall into arrears. It was
impossible to overlook the bailiff's not having mown the meadows and
letting the hay spoil; and it was equally impossible to mow eighty
dessiatinas where a young copse had been planted. It was impossible to
excuse a laborer who had gone home in the busy season because his
father was dying, however sorry he might feel for him, and he must
subtract from his pay those costly months of idleness, but it was
impossible not to allow monthly rations to the old servants who were
of absolutely no use.

Levin knew also that when he got home he must first of all go to his
wife, who was unwell, and that the peasants who had been waiting for
three hours to see him could wait a little longer. He knew too that,
regardless of all the pleasure he felt in taking a swarm, he must
forego that pleasure, and leave the old man to see to the bees
alone, while he talked to the peasants who had come after him to the
beehouse.

Whether he were acting rightly or wrongly he did not know, and far
from trying to prove which it was nowadays he avoided all thought or
talk about it.

Reasoning had brought him to doubt, and prevented him from seeing
what he ought to do and what he ought not. When he did not think,
but simply lived, he was continually aware of the presence of an
infallible judge in his soul, determining which of two possible
courses of action was the better and which was the worse; and as
soon as he did not act rightly, he was at once aware of it.

So he lived, not knowing and not seeing any chance of knowing what
he was and what he was living for, and harassed at this lack of
knowledge to such a point that he was afraid of suicide, and yet
firmly laying down his own individual definite path in life.

                           XI.


The day on which Sergei Ivanovich came to Pokrovskoe was one of
Levin's most painful days.

It was the very busiest working time, when all the peasantry show an
extraordinary intensity of self-sacrifice in labor, such as is not
to be found in any other conditions of life and would be highly
esteemed if the men who showed these qualities themselves thought
highly of them, and if it were not repeated every year, and if the
results of this intense labor were not so simple.

To reap and bind and cart off the rye and oats; to mow the
meadows, turn over the fallows, thresh the seed and sow the winter
corn- all this seems so simple and ordinary; but to succeed in getting
through it all everyone in the village, from the old man to the
young child, must toil incessantly for three or four weeks, three
times as hard as usual, living on kvass, onions, and black bread,
threshing and carrying the sheaves at night, and not giving more
than two or three hours in the twenty-four to sleep. And every year
this is done all over Russia.

Having lived the greater part of his life in the country and in
the closest relations with the peasants, Levin always felt in this
busy time that he was infected by this general quickening of energy in
the people.

In the early morning he rode over to the first sowing of the rye,
and to the oats, which were being carried to the stacks, and,
returning home at the time his wife and sister-in-law were getting up,
he drank coffee with them and walked to the grange, where a new
threshing machine was to be set working to get ready the seed.

All this day Levin, while talking with the bailiff and the peasants,
and, at home, with his wife, and Dolly, and her children, and his
father-in-law, kept on thinking of one thing, and one thing only- that
which at this time engrossed him most outside of the cares of his
estate; and in everything he sought a relation to his questioning:
"What am I, then? And where am I? And why am I here?"

He was standing in the cool threshing barn, still fragrant with
the leaves of the hazel branches interlaced on the freshly peeled
aspen beams of the new thatch roof. He gazed through the open door
in which the dry bitter chaff dust swirled and played; at the grass of
the threshing floor in the sunlight and the fresh straw that had
been brought in from the barn; then at the speckly-headed,
white-breasted swallows that flew chirping in under the roof and,
fluttering their wings, settled in the crevices of the doorway; then
at the peasants bustling in the dark, dusty barn, and he thought
strange thoughts.

"Why is all this being done?" he thought. "Why am I standing here,
making them work? What are they all so busy for, trying to show
their zeal before me? For what reason is old Matriona, my old
friend, toiling? (I doctored her, when the beam fell on her in the
fire)," he thought, looking at a thin old woman who was raking up
the grain, moving painfully with her bare, sun-blackened feet over the
uneven, rough floor. "Then she recovered, but today or tomorrow or
in ten years she won't; they'll bury her, and nothing will be left
either of her or of that dashing woman in the red skirt, who with that
skillful, gentle action is shaking the ears out of their husks.
They'll bury her, as well as this piebald gelding, and very soon too,"
he thought, gazing at the heavily moving, panting horse that kept
walking up the treadwheel that turned under him. "And they will bury
her, and Fiodor the thresher with his curly beard full of chaff, and
his shirt torn on his white shoulders- they will bury him. He's
untying the sheaves, and giving orders, and shouting to the women, and
quickly setting straight the strap on the moving wheel. And what's
more, it's not them alone- they'll bury me too, and nothing will be
left. What for? "

He thought this, and at the same time looked at his watch to
reckon how much they threshed in an hour. He wanted to know this so as
to judge by it the task to set for the day.

"It'll soon be one, and they're only beginning the third sheaf,"
thought Levin. He went up to the man who was feeding the machine,
and shouting over the roar of the machine, he told him to feed it more
slowly.

"You put in too much at a time, Fiodor. Do you see- it gets
choked, that's why it isn't getting on. Do it evenly."

Fiodor, black with the dust that clung to his moist face, shouted
something in response, but still went on doing as Levin did not want
him to.

Levin, going up to the machine, moved Fiodor aside, and began
feeding the machine himself.

Working on till the peasants' dinner hour, which was not long in
coming, he went out of the barn with Fiodor and fell into talk with
him, stopping beside a neat yellow sheaf of rye laid on the
threshing floor for seed.

Fiodor came from a village at some distance from the one in which
Levin had once allotted land to his co-operative association. Now it
had been let to the innkeeper.

Levin talked to Fiodor about this land and asked whether Platon, a
well-to-do peasant of good character belonging to the same village,
would not take the land for the coming year.

"It's a high rent; it wouldn't pay Platon, Konstantin Dmitrich,"
answered the peasant, picking the ears off his sweat-drenched shirt.

"But how does Kirillov make it pay?"

"Mitukha!" (So the peasant called the innkeeper in a tone of
contempt.) "You may be sure he'll make it pay, Konstantin Dmitrich!
He'll get his share, however he has to squeeze to get it! He's no
mercy on a peasant. But Uncle Fokanich" (so he called the old
peasant Platon)- "do you suppose he'd flay the skin off a man? Where
there's debt, he'll let anyone off. And he'll suffer losses. He's
human, too."

"But why will he let anyone off?"

"Oh, well, of course, folks are different. One man lives for his own
wants and nothing else, like Mitukha, thinking only of filling his
belly; but Fokanich is a righteous old man. He lives for his soul.
He does not forget God."

"How does he think of God? How does he live for his soul?" Levin
almost shouted.

"Why, to be sure, in truth, in God's way. Folks are different.
Take you, now- you wouldn't wrong a man..."

"Yes, yes- good-by!" said Levin, breathless with excitement, and
turning round he took his stick and walked quickly away toward home.
At the peasant's words that Fokanich lived for his soul, in truth,
in God's way, undefined but significant ideas seemed to burst forth,
as though they had been locked up, and, all of them striving toward
one goal, they thronged whirling through his head, blinding him with
their light.

                           XII.


Levin strode along the highroad, absorbed not so much in his
thoughts (he could not yet disentangle them), as in his spiritual
condition, unlike anything he had experienced before.

The words uttered by the peasant had acted on his soul like an
electric shock, suddenly transforming and combining into a single
whole the whole swarm of disjointed, impotent, separate thoughts
that incessantly occupied his mind. These thoughts had unconsciously
been in his mind even when he was talking about the land.

He was aware of something new in his soul, and joyfully tested
this new thing, not yet knowing what it was.

"Not living for his own wants, but for God? For what God? And
could one say anything more senseless than what he said? He said
that one must not live for one's own wants, that is, that one must not
live for what we understand, what we are attracted by, what we desire-
but must live for something incomprehensible, for God, whom no one can
understand nor even define. What of it? Didn't I understand those
senseless words of Fiodor's? And understanding them, did I doubt their
truth? Did I think them stupid, obscure, inexact?

"No, I understood him, and exactly as he understands the words. I
understood them more fully and clearly than I understand anything in
life, and never in my life have I doubted nor can I doubt about
them. And not only I, but everyone, the whole world, understands
nothing fully but this, and about this only they have no doubt, and
are always agreed.

"Fiodor says that Kirillov, the innkeeper, lives for his belly.
That's comprehensible and rational. All of us as rational beings can't
do anything else but live for our belly. And all of a sudden the
same Fiodor says that one mustn't live for one's belly, but must
live for truth, for God, and, at a hint, I understand him! And I and
millions of men, men who lived ages ago and men living now-
peasants, the poor in spirit and the sages, who have thought and
written about it, in their obscure words saying the same thing- we are
all agreed about this one thing: what we must live for and what is
good. I and all men have only one firm, incontestable, clear
knowledge, and that knowledge cannot be explained by reason- it is
outside it, and has no causes, and can have no effects.

"If goodness has causes, it is not goodness; if it has effects- a
reward- it is not goodness either. So goodness is outside the chain of
cause and effect.

"And yet I know it, and we all know it.

"And I sought miracles, complained that I did not see a miracle
which would convince me. And here is a miracle, the sole miracle
possible, continually existing, surrounding me on all sides, and I
never noticed it!

 "What could be a greater miracle than that?

"Can I have found the solution of it all? Can my sufferings be
over?" thought Levin, striding along the dusty road, not noticing
the heat nor his weariness, and experiencing a sense of relief from
prolonged suffering. This feeling was so delicious that it seemed to
him incredible. He was breathless with emotion and incapable of
going farther; he turned off the road into the forest and lay down
in the shade of an aspen on the uncut grass. He took his hat off his
hot head and lay propped on his elbow in the lush, feathery,
woodland grass.

"Yes, I must make it clear to myself and understand," he thought,
looking intently at the untrampled grass before him, and following the
movements of a green beetle, advancing along a blade of couch grass
and lifting up in its progress a leaf of goatweed. "Everything from
beginning?" he asked himself, bending aside the leaf of goatweed out
of the beetle's way and twisting another blade of grass above for
the beetle to cross over to. "What is it makes me glad? What have I
discovered?

"Of old I used to say that in my body, that in the body of this
grass and of this beetle (there, she didn't care for the grass,
she's opened her wings and flown away), there was going on a
transformation of matter in accordance with physical, chemical, and
physiological laws. And in all of us, as well as in the aspens and
clouds and nebulae, there was a process of evolution. Evolution from
what? Into what?- Eternal evolution and struggle... As though there
could be any sort of tendency and struggle in the eternal! And I was
astonished that in spite of utmost effort of thought in this direction
I could not discover the meaning of life, the meaning of my impulses
and yearnings. And the meaning of my impulses is so clear within me,
that I was living according to them all the time, and I was astonished
and rejoiced, when the peasant expressed it to me: to live for God,
for my soul.

"I have discovered nothing. I have only found out what I knew. I
understand the force that in the past gave me life, and now too
gives me life. I have been set free from falsity, I have found the
Master."

And he briefly went through, mentally, the whole course of his ideas
during the last two years, the beginning of which was the clear
confronting of death at the sight of his dear brother hopelessly ill.

Then, for the first time, grasping that for every man, and himself
too, there was nothing in store but suffering, death and eternal
oblivion, he had made up his mind that life was impossible like
that, and that he must either interpret life so that it would not
present itself to him as the evil jest of some devil, or else shoot
himself.

But he had not done either, but had gone on living, thinking, and
feeling, and had even at that very time married, and had had many
joys, and had been happy, when he was not thinking of the meaning of
his life.

What did this mean? It meant that he had been living rightly, but
thinking wrongly.

He had lived (without being aware of it) on those spiritual truths
that he had sucked in with his mother's milk, but he had thought,
not merely without recognition of these truths, but studiously
ignoring them.

Now it was clear to him that he could live only by virtue of the
beliefs in which he had been brought up.

"What should I have been, and how should I have spent my life, if
I had not had these beliefs, if I had not known that I must live for
God and not for my own wants? I should have robbed and lied and
killed. Nothing of what makes the chief happiness of my life would
have existed for me." And with the utmost stretch of imagination he
could not conceive the brutal creature he would have been himself,
if he had not known what he was living for.

"I looked for an answer to my question. And thought could not give
an answer to my question- it is incommensurable with my question.
The answer has been given me by life itself, in my knowledge of what
is right and what is wrong. And that knowledge I did not arrive at
in any way, it was given to me as to all men, given, because I could
not have got it from anywhere.

"Where could I have got it? Could I have arrived through reason at
knowing that I must love my neighbor and not oppress him? I was told
that in my childhood, and I believed it gladly, for they told me
what was already in my soul. But who discovered it? Not reason. Reason
discovered the struggle for existence, and the law that requires us to
oppress all who hinder the satisfaction of our desires. That is the
deduction of reason. But loving one's neighbor reason could never
discover, because that is unreasonable.

"Yes, pride," he said to himself, turning over on his abdomen and
beginning to tie a noose of blades of grass, trying not to break them.

"And not merely pride of intellect, but dullness of intellect. And
most of all, its knavishness; yes, the knavishness of intellect. The
cheating knavishness of intellect- that's it," he repeated.

                           XIII.


And Levin remembered a scene he had lately witnessed between Dolly
and her children. The children, left to themselves, had begun
cooking raspberries over the candles and squirting milk into each
other's mouths with a syringe. Their mother, catching them at these
pranks, began reminding them in Levin's presence of the trouble
their mischief gave to the grown-up people, and that this trouble
was all for their sake, and that if they smashed the cups they would
have nothing to drink their tea out of, and that if they wasted the
milk, they would have nothing to eat, and die of hunger.

And Levin had been struck by the passive, weary incredulity with
which the children heard what their mother said to them. They were
simply annoyed that their amusing play had been interrupted, and did
not believe a word of what their mother was saying. They could not
believe it indeed, for they could not take in the immensity of all
they habitually enjoyed, and so could not conceive that what they were
destroying was the very thing they lived by.

"That all comes of itself," they thought, "and there's nothing
interesting or important about it, because it has always been so,
and always will be so. And it's all always the same. We've no need
to think about that, it's all ready; but we want to invent something
of our own, and new. So we thought of putting raspberries in a cup,
and cooking them over a candle, and squirting milk straight into
each other's mouths. That's fun, and something new, and not a bit
worse than drinking out of cups."

"Isn't it just the same that we do, that I did, searching by the aid
of reason for the significance of the forces of nature and the meaning
of the life of man?" he thought.

"And don't all the theories of philosophy do the same, trying by the
path of thought, which is strange and not natural to man, to bring him
to a knowledge of what he has known long ago, and knows so certainly
that he could not live at all without it? Isn't it distinctly to be
seen in the development of each philosopher's theory, that he knows
what is the chief significance of life beforehand, just as
positively as the peasant Fiodor, and not a bit more clearly than
he, and is simply trying by a dubious intellectual path to come back
to what everyone knows?

"Now then, leave the children to themselves to get things alone
and make their crockery, get the milk from the cows, and so on.
Would they be naughty then? Why, they'd die of hunger! Well, then,
leave us with our passions and thoughts, without any idea of the one
God, of the Creator, or without any idea of what is right, without any
idea of moral evil.

"Just try and build up anything without those ideas!

"We destroy them only because we're spiritually provided for.
Exactly like the children!

"Whence have I that joyful knowledge, shared with the peasant,
that alone gives peace to my soul? Whence did I get it?

"Brought up with an idea of God, a Christian, my whole life filled
with the spiritual blessings Christianity has given me, full of
them, and living on these blessings, like the children I did not
understand them, and destroy- that is, try to destroy- what I live by.
And as soon as an important moment of life comes, like the children
when they are cold and hungry, I turn to Him, and even less than the
children when their mother's scold them for their childish mischief,
do I feel that my childish efforts at wanton madness are reckoned
against me.

"Yes, what I know, I know not by reason- but it has been given to
me, revealed to me, and I know it with my heart, by faith in the chief
thing taught by the Church.

"The Church? The Church!" Levin repeated to himself. He turned
over on the other side, and, leaning on his elbow, fell to gazing into
the distance at a herd of cattle crossing over to the river.

"But can I believe in all the Church teaches?" he thought, putting
himself to the test, and thinking of everything that could destroy his
present peace of mind. Intentionally he recalled all those doctrines
of the Church which had always seemed most strange and had always been
a stumbling block to him. The Creation? But how did I explain
existence? By existence? By nothing? The devil and sin. But how do I
explain evil?... The Redeemer?...

"But I know nothing, nothing, and I can know nothing but what has
been told to me and all men."

And it seemed to him now that there was not a single article of
faith of the Church which could destroy the chief thing- faith in God,
in goodness, as the one goal of man's destiny.

Under every article of faith of the Church could be put the faith in
the service of truth instead of one's wants. And each doctrine did not
simply leave that faith unshaken- each doctrine seemed essential to
complete that great miracle, continually manifest upon earth, that
made it possible for each man, and millions of different sorts of men-
wise men and imbeciles, old men and children- all men, peasants, Lvov,
Kitty, beggars and kings, to understand perfectly the same one
thing, and to build up thereby that life of the soul which alone is
worth living, and which alone is precious to us.

Lying on his back, he gazed up now into the high, cloudless sky. "Do
I not know that that is infinite space, and that it is not a round
arch? But, however I screw up my eyes and strain my sight, I cannot
see it as not round and not bounded, and, in spite of my knowing about
infinite space, I am incontestably right when I see a solid blue dome,
and more right than when I strain my eyes to see beyond it."

Levin ceased thinking, and only, as it were, listened to
mysterious voices that seemed talking joyfully and earnestly with each
other.

"Can this be faith?" he thought, afraid to believe in his happiness.
"My God, I thank Thee!" he said, gulping down his sobs, and with
both hands brushing away the tears that filled his eyes.

                           XIV.


Levin looked before him and saw a herd of cattle, then he caught
sight of his wagonette with Black in the shafts, and the coachman,
who, driving up to the herd, said something to the herdsman. Then he
heard the rattle of the wheels and the snort of the sleek horse
close by him. But he was so buried in his thoughts that he did not
even wonder why the coachman had come for him.

He only thought of that when the coachman had driven quite up to him
and shouted to him.

"The mistress sent me. Your brother has come, and some gentleman
with him."

Levin got into the wagonette and took the reins.

As though just roused out of sleep, for a long while Levin could not
collect his faculties. He stared at the sleek horse flecked with
lather between his haunches and on his neck, where the harness rubbed,
stared at Ivan the coachman, sitting beside him, and remembered that
he was expecting his brother, thought that his wife was most likely
uneasy at his long absence, and tried to guess who was the visitor who
had come with his brother. And his brother and his wife and the
unknown guest seemed to him now quite different from before. He
fancied that now his relations with all men would be different.

"With my brother there will be none of that aloofness there always
used to be between us, there will be no disputes; with Kitty there
shall never be quarrels; with the visitor, whoever he may be, I will
be friendly and amiable; and with the servants, with Ivan- it will all
be different."

Pulling the stiff rein and holding in the good horse that snorted
with impatience and begged to be let go, Levin looked round at Ivan
sitting beside him, not knowing what to do with his unoccupied
hands, continually pressing down his shirt as it puffed out, and he
tried to find something to start a conversation about with him. He
would have said that Ivan had pulled the saddle girth up too high, but
that was like blame, and he longed for friendly, warm talk. Nothing
else occurred to him.

"Your Honor must keep to the right and mind that stump," said the
coachman, pulling the rein Levin held.

"Please don't touch anything and don't teach me!" said Levin,
angered by this interference. Now, as always, interference made him
angry, and he felt sorrowfully at once how mistaken had been his
supposition that his spiritual condition could immediately change
him in contact with reality.

He was not a quarter of a versta from home when he saw Grisha and
Tania running to meet him.

"Uncle Kostia! Mamma's coming, and grandfather, and Sergei
Ivanovich, and someone else," they said, clambering up into the
wagonette.

"Who is he?"

"An awfully terrible person! And he does like this with his arms,"
said Tania, getting up in the wagonette and mimicking Katavassov.

"Old or young?" asked Levin, laughing, reminded of someone, he did
not know whom, by Tania's performance.

"Oh, I hope it's not a tiresome person!" thought Levin.

As soon as he turned, at a bend in the road, and saw the party
coming, Levin recognized Katavassov in a straw hat, walking along
swinging his arms just as Tania had shown him.

Katavassov was very fond of discussing metaphysics, having derived
his notions from natural science writers who had never studied
metaphysics, and in Moscow Levin had had many arguments with him of
late.

And one of these arguments, in which Katavassov had obviously
considered that he came off victorious, was the first thing Levin
thought of as he recognized him.

"No, whatever I do, I won't argue and give utterance to my ideas
lightly," he thought.

Getting out of the wagonette and greeting his brother and
Katavassov, Levin asked about his wife.

"She has taken Mitia to Kolok" (a copse near the house). "She
meant to have him out there because it's so hot indoors," said
Dolly. Levin had always advised his wife not to take the baby to the
wood, thinking it unsafe, and he was not pleased to hear this.

"She rushes about from place to place with him," said the Prince,
smiling. "I advised her to try putting him in the icehouse."

"She meant to come to the apiary. She thought you would be there. We
are going there," said Dolly.

"Well, and what are you doing?" said Sergei Ivanovich, falling
back from the rest and walking beside him.

"Oh, nothing special. Busy as usual with the land," answered
Levin. "Well, and what about you? Come for long? We have been
expecting you for such a long time."

"Only for a fortnight. I've a great deal to do in Moscow."

At these words the brothers' eyes met, and Levin, in spite of the
desire he always had, stronger than ever just now, to be on
affectionate and still more open terms with his brother, felt an
awkwardness in looking at him. He dropped his eyes and did not know
what to say.

Casting over the subjects of conversation that would be pleasant
to Sergei Ivanovich, and would keep him off the subject of the Servian
war and the Slavonic question, at which he had hinted by alluding to
what he had to do in Moscow, Levin began to talk of Sergei Ivanovich's
book.

"Well, have there been any reviews of your book?" he asked.

Sergei Ivanovich smiled at the intentional character of the
question.

"No one is interested in that now, and I least of all," he said.
"Just look, Darya Alexandrovna, we shall have a shower," he added,
pointing with a sunshade at the white rain clouds that showed above
the aspen treetops.

And these words were enough to reestablish again between the
brothers that tone- hardly hostile, but chilly- which Levin had been
so longing to avoid.

Levin went up to Katavassov.

"It was jolly of you to make up your mind to come," he said to him.

"I've been intending to a long while. Now we shall have some
discussion- we'll see to that. Have you been reading Spencer?"

"No, I've not finished reading him," said Levin. "But I don't need
him now."

"How's that? That's interesting. Why so?"

"I mean that I'm fully convinced that the solution of the problems
that interest me I shall never find in him and his like. Now..."

But Katavassov's serene and good-humored expression suddenly
struck him, and he felt such tenderness for his own happy mood,
which he was unmistakably disturbing by this conversation, that he
remembered his resolution and stopped short.

"But we'll talk later on," he added. "If we're going to the
apiary, it's this way, along this little path," he said, addressing
them all.

Going along the narrow path to a little uncut meadow covered on
one side with thick clumps of brilliant heartsease, among which
stood up here and there tall, dark green tufts of hellebore, Levin
settled his guests in the dense, cool shade of the young aspens on a
bench and some stumps purposely put there for visitors to the apiary
who might be afraid of the bees, and he went off himself to the hut to
get bread, cucumbers, and fresh honey, to regale them with.

Trying to make his movements as deliberate as possible, and
listening to the bees that buzzed more and more frequently past him,
he walked along the little path to the hut. In the very entry one
bee hummed angrily, caught in his beard, but he carefully extricated
it. Going into the shady outer room, he took down from the wall his
veil, that hung on a peg, and putting it on, and thrusting his hands
into his pockets, he went into the fenced-in bee garden, where there
stood in the midst of a closely mown space in regular rows, fastened
with bast on posts, all the hives he knew so well, the old stocks,
each with its own history, and along the fences the younger swarms
hived that year. In front of the openings of the hives, it made his
eyes giddy to watch the bees and drones whirling round and round about
the same spot, while among them the worker bees flew in and out with
spoils, or in search of them, always in the same direction, into the
wood, to the flowering linden trees, and back to the hives.

His ears were filled with the incessant hum in various notes- now
the busy hum of the worker bee flying quickly off, then the blaring of
the lazy drone, and the excited buzz of the bees on guard,
protecting their property from the enemy and preparing to sting. On
the farther side of the fence the old beekeeper was shaving a hoop for
a tub, and he did not see Levin. Levin stood still in the midst of the
apiary and did not call him.

He was glad of a chance to be alone to recover from the influence of
ordinary actual life, which had already depressed his happy mood.

He thought that he had already had time to lose his temper with
Ivan, to show coolness to his brother, and to talk flippantly with
Katavassov.

"Can it have been only a momentary mood, and will it pass and
leave no trace?" he thought.

But the same instant, going back to his mood, he felt with delight
that something new and important had happened to him. Real life had
only for a time overcast the spiritual peace he had found, but it
was still untouched within him.

Just as the bees, whirling round him, now menacing him and
distracting his attention, prevented him from enjoying complete
physical peace, forced him to restrain his movements to avoid them, so
had the petty cares that had swarmed about him from the moment he
got into the trap, restricted his spiritual freedom; but that lasted
only so long as he was among them. Just as his bodily strength was
still unaffected, in spite of the bees, so too was the spiritual
strength that he had just become aware of.

                           XV.


"Do you know, Kostia, with whom Sergei Ivanovich traveled on his way
here?" said Dolly, doling out cucumbers and honey to the children.
"With Vronsky! He's going to Servia."

"And not alone; he's taking a squadron out with him at his own
expense," said Katavassov.

"That's the right thing for him," said Levin. "Are volunteers
still going out then?" he added, glancing at Sergei Ivanovich.

Sergei Ivanovich did not answer. He was carefully, with a blunt
knife, getting a live bee covered with sticky honey out of a cup
full of white honeycomb.

"I should think so! You should have seen what was going on at the
station yesterday!" said Katavassov, biting with a succulent sound
into a cucumber.

"Well, what is one to make of it? In Christ's name, do explain to
me, Sergei Ivanovich, where are all those volunteers going, whom are
they fighting with," asked the old Prince, unmistakably taking up a
conversation that had sprung up in Levin's absence.

"With the Turks," Sergei Ivanovich answered, smiling serenely, as he
extricated the bee, dark with honey and helplessly kicking, and
transferred it with the knife to a stout aspen leaf.

"But who has declared war on the Turks?- Ivan Ivanovich Ragozov
and Countess Lidia Ivanovna, assisted by Madame Stahl?"

"No one has declared war, but people sympathize with their
neighbors' suffering, and are eager to help them," said Sergei
Ivanovich.

"But the Prince is not speaking of help," said Levin, coming to
the assistance of his father-in-law, "but of war. The Prince says that
private persons cannot take part in war without the permission of
the government."

"Kostia, mind, that's a bee! Really, they'll sting us!" said
Dolly, waving away a wasp.

"But that's not a bee- it's a wasp," said Levin.

"Well now, well- what's your own theory?" Katavassov said to Levin
with a smile, distinctly challenging him to a discussion. "Why haven't
private persons the right to do so?"

"Oh, my theory's this: war is on one side such a beastly, cruel
and awful thing, that no one man, not to speak of a Christian, can
individually take upon himself the responsibility of beginning wars;
that can only be done by a government, which is called upon to do
this, and is driven inevitably into war. On the other hand, both
political science and common sense teach us that in matters of
state, and especially in the matter of war, private citizens must
forego their personal individual will."

Sergei Ivanovich and Katavassov had their replies ready, and both
began speaking at the same time.

"But the point is, my dear fellow, that there may be cases when
the government does not carry out the will of the citizens, and then
the public asserts its will," said Katavassov.

But evidently Sergei Ivanovich did not approve of this answer. His
brows contracted at Katavassov's words, and he said something else.

"You don't put the matter in its true light. There is no question
here of a declaration of war, but simply the expression of a human
Christian feeling. Our brothers, one with us in religion and in
race, are being massacred. Even supposing they were not our
brothers, nor fellow Christians, but simply children, women, old
people, feeling is aroused and Russians go eagerly to help in stopping
these atrocities. Fancy, if you were going along the street and saw
drunken men beating a woman or a child- I imagine you would not stop
to inquire whether war had been declared on the men, but would throw
yourself on them, and protect the victim."

"But I should not kill them," said Levin.

"Yes, you would kill them."

"I don't know. If I saw that, I might give way to my impulse of
the moment, but I can't say beforehand. And such a momentary impulse
there is not, and there cannot be, in the case of the oppression of
the Slavonic peoples."

"Possibly for you there is not; but for others there is," said
Sergei Ivanovich, frowning with displeasure. "There are traditions
still extant among our people about orthodox men, suffering under
the yoke of the 'impious Hagarites.' The people have heard of the
sufferings of their brethren, and have spoken."

"Perhaps so," said Levin evasively; "but I don't see it. I'm one
of the people myself, and I don't feel it."

"Here am I, too," said the old Prince. "I've been staying abroad and
reading the papers, and I must own, up to the time of the Bulgarian
atrocities, I couldn't make out why it was all the Russians were all
of a sudden so fond of their Slavonic brethren, while I didn't feel
the slightest affection for them. I was very much upset, thought I was
a monster, or that it was the influence of Carlsbad on me. But since I
have been here, my mind's been set at rest. I see that there are
people besides me who're only interested in Russia, and not in their
Slavonic brethren. Here's Konstantin, too."

"Personal opinions mean nothing in such a case," said Sergei
Ivanovich; "it's not a matter of personal opinions when all Russia-
the whole people- has expressed its will."

"But excuse me, I don't see that. The people don't know anything
about it, if you come to that," said the old Prince.

"Oh, papa!... How can you say that? And last Sunday in church?..."
said Dolly, listening to the conversation. "Please give me a towel,"
she said to the old man, who was looking at the children with a smile.
"Why, it's not possible that all..."

"But what was it in church on Sunday? The priest had been told to
read that. He read it. They didn't understand a word of it, sighed
as they do at every sermon," pursued the old Prince. "Then they were
told that there was to be a collection for a pious object in church;
well, they pulled out their coppers and gave them, but what for they
couldn't say."

"The people cannot help knowing; the sense of their own destinies is
always in the people, and at such moments as the present that sense
finds utterance," said Sergei Ivanovich with conviction, glancing at
the old beekeeper.

The handsome old man, with black grizzled beard and thick silvery
hair, stood motionless, holding a cup of honey, looking down from
the height of his tall figure with friendly serenity at the
gentlefolk, obviously understanding nothing of their conversation
and not caring to understand it.

"That's so, no doubt," he said, with a significant shake of his head
at Sergei Ivanovich's words.

"Here, then, ask him. He knows nothing about it and thinks nothing,"
said Levin. "Have you heard about the war, Mikhailich?" he said,
turning to him. "What they read in the church? What do you think about
it? Ought we to fight for the Christians?"

"What should we think? Alexander Nikolaevich our Emperor has thought
for us; he thinks for us indeed in all things. It's clearer for him to
see. Shall I bring a bit more bread? Give the little lad some more?"
he said, addressing Darya Alexandrovna and pointing to Grisha, who was
finishing his crust.

"I don't need to ask," said Sergei Ivanovich, "we have seen and
are seeing hundreds and hundreds of people who give up everything to
serve a just cause, come from every part of Russia, and directly and
clearly express their thought and aim. They bring their coppers, or go
themselves and say directly what's what. What does it mean?"

"It means, to my thinking," said Levin, who was beginning to get
warm, "that among eighty millions of people there can always be
found not hundreds, as now, but tens of thousands of people who have
lost caste, ne'er-do-wells, who are always ready to go anywhere- to
Pugachiov's bands, to Khiva, to Servia..."

"I tell you that it's not a case of hundreds or of ne'er-do-wells,
but the best representatives of the people!" said Sergei Ivanovich,
with as much irritation as if he were defending the last penny of
his fortune. "And what of the subscriptions? In this case it is a
whole people directly expressing their will."

"That word 'people' is so vague," said Levin. "Parish clerks,
schoolmasters, and one in a thousand of the peasants, maybe, know what
it's all about. The rest of the eighty millions, like Mikhailich,
far from expressing their will, haven't the faintest idea what there
is for them to express their will about. What right have we to say
that this is the people's will?"

                           XVI.


Sergei Ivanovich, being practiced in dialectics, did not reply,
but at once turned the conversation to another aspect of the subject.

"Oh, if you want to learn the spirit of the people by arithmetical
computation, of course it's very difficult to arrive at it. And voting
has not been introduced among us, and cannot be introduced, for it
does not express the will of the people; but there are other ways of
reaching that. It is felt in the air, it is felt by the heart. I won't
speak of those deep currents which are astir in the still ocean of the
people, and which are evident to every unprejudiced man- let us look
at society in the narrow sense. All the most diverse sections of the
intelligent people, hostile before, are merged in one. Every
division is at an end, all the public organs say the same thing over
and over again, all feel the mighty torrent that has overtaken them
and is carrying them in one direction."

"Yes, all the newspapers do say the same thing," said the Prince.
"That's true. But so it is the same thing that all the frogs croak
before storm. One can hear nothing for them."

"Frogs or no frogs, I'm not the publisher of newspapers and I
don't want to defend them; but I am speaking of the unanimity in the
intellectual world," said Sergei Ivanovich, addressing his brother.
Levin would have answered, but the old Prince interrupted him.

"Well, about that unanimity, that's another thing, one may say,"
said the Prince. "There's my son-in-law, Stepan Arkadyevich- you
know him. He's got a place now on the committee of a commission and
something or other, I don't remember. Only there's nothing to do in
it- why, Dolly, it's no secret- and a salary of eight thousand! You
try asking him whether his post is of any use- he'll prove to you that
it's most necessary. And he's a truthful man, too, but one can't
help but believe in the utility of eight thousand roubles."

"Yes- he asked me to give a message to Darya Alexandrovna about
the post," said Sergei Ivanovich reluctantly, feeling the Prince's
remark to be ill-timed.

"So it is with the unanimity of the press. That's been explained
to me: as soon as there's war their incomes are doubled. How can
they help believing in the destinies of the people and the Slavonic
races- and all that sort of thing?..."

"I don't care for many of the papers, but that's unjust," said
Sergei Ivanovich.

"I would only make one condition," pursued the old Prince. "Alphonse
Karr said a capital thing before the war with Prussia: 'You consider
war to be inevitable? Very good. Let everyone who advocates war be
enrolled in a special regiment of advance guards, for the vanguard
of every assault, of every attack, to lead them all!'"

"A nice lot the editors would make!" said Katavassov, with a loud
roar, as he pictured the editors he knew in this picked legion.

"But they'd run," said Dolly. "They'd only be in the way."

"Oh, if they ran away, then we'd have grapeshot or Cossacks with
whips behind them," said the Prince.

"But that's a joke, and a poor one too, if you'll excuse me saying
so, Prince," said Sergei Ivanovich.

"I don't see that it was a joke, that... Levin was beginning, but
Sergei Ivanovich interrupted him.

"Every member of society is called upon to do his own special work,"
said he. "And men of thought are doing their work when they express
public opinion. And the singlehearted and full expression of public
opinion is the service of the press, and a phenomenon to rejoice us at
the same time. Twenty years ago we should have been silent, but now we
have heard the voice of the Russian people, which is ready to rise
as one man and ready to sacrifice itself for its oppressed brethren;
that is a great step and a proof of strength."

"But it's not only making a sacrifice, but killing Turks," said
Levin timidly. "The people make sacrifices and are ready to make
sacrifices for their soul, but not for murder," he added,
instinctively connecting the conversation with the ideas that had been
absorbing his mind.

"For their soul? That, you understand, is a most puzzling expression
for a student of the natural sciences. What sort of thing is the
soul?" said Katavassov, smiling.

"Oh, you know!"

"No, by God, I haven't the faintest idea!" said Katavassov with a
loud roar of laughter.

"'I bring not peace, but a sword,' says Christ," Sergei Ivanovich
rejoined for his part, quoting as simply as though it were the easiest
thing to understand the very passage that had always puzzled Levin
most.

"That's so, no doubt," the old man repeated again. He was standing
near them and responded to a chance glance turned in his direction.

"Ah, my dear fellow, you're defeated, utterly defeated!" cried
Katavassov good-humoredly.

Levin reddened with vexation, not at being defeated, but at having
failed to control himself and being drawn into argument.

"No, I can't argue with them," he thought; "they wear impenetrable
armor, while I'm naked."

He saw that it was impossible to convince his brother and
Katavassov, and he saw even less possibility of himself agreeing
with them. What they advocated was the very pride of intellect that
had almost been his ruin. He could not admit that some dozens of
men, among them his brother, had the right, on the ground of what they
were told by some hundreds of glib volunteers swarming to the capital,
to say that they and the newspapers were expressing the will and
feeling of the people, and a feeling which was expressed in
vengeance and murder. He could not admit this, because he neither
saw the expression of such feelings in the people among whom he was
living, nor found them in himself (and he could not but consider
himself one of the persons making up the Russian people), and most
of all because he, like the people, did not know and could not know
what is for the general good, though he knew beyond a doubt that
this general good could be attained only by the strict observance of
that law of right and wrong which has been revealed to every man,
and therefore he could not wish for war or advocate war for any
general objects whatever. He said as Mikhailich did and the people,
who had expressed their feeling in the traditional invitations to
the Variaghi: "Be princes and rule over us. Gladly we promise complete
submission. All the labor, all humiliations, all sacrifices we take
upon ourselves; but we will not judge and decide." And now,
according to Sergei Ivanovich's account, the people had foregone
this privilege they had bought at such a costly price.

He wanted to say, too, that if public opinion were an infallible
guide, then why were not revolutions and the commune as lawful as
the movement in favor of the Slavonic peoples? But these were merely
thoughts that could settle nothing. One thing could be seen beyond
doubt- that at the actual moment the discussion was irritating
Sergei Ivanovich, and so it was wrong to continue it. And Levin ceased
speaking and then called the attention of his guests to the fact
that the storm clouds were gathering, and that they had better be
going home before it rained.

                           XVII.


The old Prince and Sergei Ivanovich got into the wagonette and drove
off; the rest of the party hastened homeward on foot.

But the storm clouds, turning white and then black, moved down so
quickly that they had to quicken their pace to get home before the
rain. The foremost clouds, lowering and black as soot-laden smoke,
rushed with extraordinary swiftness over the sky. They were still
two hundred paces from home and a gust of wind had already blown up,
and every second the downpour might be looked for.

The children ran ahead with frightened and gleeful shrieks. Darya
Alexandrovna, struggling painfully with her skirts clinging round
her legs, was not walking, but running, her eyes fixed on the
children. The men of the party, holding their hats on, strode with
long steps beside her. They were just at the steps when a big drop
fell splashing on the edge of the iron guttering. The children and
their elders after them ran into the shelter of the house, talking
merrily.

"Katerina Alexandrovna?" Levin asked of Agathya Mikhailovna, who met
them with shawls and plaids in the hall.

"We thought she was with you," she said.

"And Mitia?"

"In Kolok, he must be, and the nurse with him."

Levin snatched up the plaids and ran toward the copse.

In that brief interval of time the storm clouds had moved on,
covering the sun so completely that it was dark as an eclipse.
Stubbornly, as though insisting on its rights, the wind stopped Levin,
and tearing the leaves and flowers off the linden trees and
stripping the white birch branches into strange unseemly nakedness, it
twisted everything to one side- acacias, flowers, burdocks, long
grass, and tall treetops. The peasant girls working in the garden
ran shrieking into shelter in the servants' quarters. The streaming
rain had already flung its white veil over all the distant forest
and half the fields close by, and was rapidly swooping down upon the
copse. The wet of the rain spurting up in tiny drops could be
smelled in the air.

Holding his head bent down before him, and struggling with the
wind that strove to tear the wraps away from him, Levin was moving
up to the copse and had just caught sight of something white behind
the oak tree, when there was a sudden flash, the whole earth seemed on
fire, and the vault of heaven seemed crashing overhead. Opening his
blinded eyes, Levin gazed through the thick veil of rain that
separated him now from the copse, and to his horror the first thing he
saw was the green crest of the familiar oak tree in the middle of
the copse uncannily changing its position. "Can it have been
struck?" Levin hardly had time to think when, moving more and more
rapidly, the oak tree vanished behind the other trees, and he heard
the crash of the great tree falling upon the others.

The flash of lightning, the crash of thunder, and the
instantaneous chill that ran through him were all merged for Levin
in one sense of terror.

"My God! My God! Not on them!" he said.

And though he thought at once how senseless was his prayer that they
should not have been killed by the oak which had fallen now, he
repeated it, knowing that he could do nothing better than utter this
senseless prayer.

Running up to the place where they usually went, he did not find
them there.

They were at the other end of the copse under an old linden tree;
they were calling him. Two figures in dark dresses (they had been
light summer dresses when they started out) were standing bending over
something. It was Kitty with the nurse. The rain was already
ceasing, and it was beginning to get light when Levin reached them.
The nurse was not wet on the lower part of her dress, but Kitty was
drenched through, and her soaked clothes clung to her. Though the rain
was over, they still stood in the same position in which they had been
standing when the storm broke. Both stood bending over a
perambulator with a green umbrella.

"Alive? Unhurt? Thank God!" he said, splashing with his soaked boots
through the standing water and running up to them.

Kitty's rosy wet face was turned toward him, and she smiled
timidly under her shapeless sopping hat.

"Aren't you ashamed of yourself? I can't think how you can be so
reckless!" he said angrily to his wife.

"It wasn't my fault, really. We were just intending to go, when he
made such a to-do that we had to change him. We were just..." Kitty
began defending herself.

Mitia was unharmed, dry, and still fast asleep.

"Well, thank God! I don't know what I'm saying!"

They gathered up the baby's wet belongings; the nurse picked up
the baby and carried it. Levin walked beside his wife, and, penitent
for having been angry, he squeezed her hand when the nurse was not
looking.

                           XVIII.


During the whole of that day, in the extremely varied
conversations in which he took part, only as it were with the top
layer of his mind, in spite of the disappointment of not finding the
change he expected in himself, Levin had been all the while joyfully
conscious of the fullness of his heart.

After the rain it was too wet to go for a walk; besides, the storm
clouds still hung about the horizon, and gathered here and there,
black and thundery, on the rim of the sky. The whole party spent the
rest of the day in the house.

No more discussions sprang up; on the contrary, after dinner
everyone was in the most amiable frame of mind.

At first Katavassov amused the ladies by his original jokes, which
always pleased people on their first acquaintance with him. Then
Sergei Ivanovich induced him to tell them about the very interesting
observations he had made on the difference between the female and male
common houseflies in their characters and even physiognomies, and
their frame of life. Sergei Ivanovich, too, was in good spirits, and
at tea his brother drew him on to explain his views of the future of
the Eastern question, and he spoke so simply and so well, that
everyone listened eagerly.

Kitty was the only one who did not hear it all- she was summoned
to give Mitia his bath.

A few minutes after Kitty had left the room she sent for Levin to
come to the nursery.

Leaving his tea, and regretfully interrupting the interesting
conversation, and at the same time uneasily wondering why he had
been sent for, as this only happened on important occasions, Levin
went to the nursery.

Although he had been much interested by Sergei Ivanovich's views
of the new epoch in history that would be created by the
emancipation of forty millions of men of Slavonic race acting with
Russia- a conception quite new to him- and although he was disturbed
by uneasy wonder at being sent for by Kitty, as soon as he came out of
the drawing room and was alone, his mind reverted at once to the
thoughts of the morning. And all the theories of the significance of
the Slav element in the history of the world seemed to him so
trivial compared with what was passing in his own soul, that he
instantly forgot it all and dropped back into the same frame of mind
that he had been in that morning.

He did not, as he had done at other times recall the whole train
of thought- that was not necessary for him. He fell back at once
into the feeling which had guided him, which was connected with
those thoughts, and he found that feeling in his soul even stronger
and more definite than before. He did not, as he had had to do with
previous attempts to find comforting arguments, need to revive a whole
chain of thought to find the feeling. Now, on the contrary, the
feeling of joy and peace was keener than ever, and thought could not
keep pace with feeling.

He walked across the terrace and looked at two stars that had come
out in the darkening sky, and suddenly he remembered. "Yes, looking at
the sky, I thought that the dome that I see is not a deception, and
then I did not think over something to the last- I shirked facing
something," he mused. "But whatever it was, there can be no disproving
it! I have but to think, and all will come clear!"

Just as he was going into the nursery he remembered what it was he
had shirked facing. It was that if the chief proof of the Divinity was
His revelation of what is right, how is it this revelation is confined
to the Christian Church alone? What relation to this revelation have
the beliefs of the Buddhists, Mohammedans, who preached and did good
too?

It seemed to him that he had an answer to this question; but he
had not time to formulate it to himself before he went into the
nursery.

Kitty was standing, with her sleeves tucked up, over the baby in the
bath. Hearing her husband's footstep, she turned toward him, summoning
him to her with her smile. With one hand she was supporting the fat
baby that lay floating and sprawling on its back, while with the other
she squeezed the sponge over him.

"Come, look, look!" she said, when her husband came up to her.
"Agathya Mikhailovna's right. He knows us!"

Mitia had on that day given unmistakable, incontestable signs of
recognizing all his friends.

As soon as Levin approached the bath, the experiment was tried,
and it was completely successful. The cook, sent for with this object,
bent over the baby. He frowned and shook his head disapprovingly.
Kitty bent down to him, he gave her a beaming smile, propped his
little hands on the sponge and chirruped, making such a queer little
contented sound with his lips that Kitty and the nurse were not
alone in their admiration- Levin, too, was surprised and delighted.

The baby was taken out of the bath, drenched with water, wrapped
in towels, dried, and, after a piercing scream, handed to his mother.

"Well, I am glad you are beginning to love him," said Kitty to her
husband, when she had settled herself comfortably in her usual
place, with the baby at her breast. "I am so glad! It had begun to
distress me. You said you had no feeling for him."

"No; did I say that? I only said I was disappointed."

"What! Disappointed in him?"

"Not disappointed in him, but in my own feeling; I had expected
more. I had expected a rush of new delightful emotion to come as a
surprise. And then instead of that- disgust, pity..."

She listened attentively, looking at him over the baby, while she
put back on her slender fingers the rings she had taken off while
giving Mitia his bath.

"And most of all, at there being far more apprehension and pity than
pleasure. Today, after that fright during the storm, I understand
how I love him."

Kitty's smile was radiant.

"Were you very much frightened?" she said. "So was I, too, but I
feel it more now that it's over. I'm going to look at the oak. How
charming Katavassov is! And what a happy day we've had altogether. And
you're so amiable with Sergei Ivanovich, when you care to be...
Well, go back to them. It's always so hot and steamy here after the
bath...."

                           XIX.


Going out of the nursery and being again alone, Levin went back at
once to the thought, in which there was something not clear.

Instead of going into the drawing room, where he heard voices, he
stopped on the terrace, and, leaning his elbows on the parapet, he
gazed up at the sky.

It was quite dark now, and in the south, where he was looking, there
were no clouds. The storm had drifted on to the opposite side of the
sky, and there were flashes of lightning and distant thunder from that
quarter. Levin listened to the monotonous drip from the linden trees
in the garden, and looked at the triangle of stars he knew so well,
and the Milky Way with its branches, that ran through its midst. At
each flash of lightning the Milky Way, and even the bright stars,
vanished, but as soon as the lightning died away, they reappeared in
their places as though some hand had flung them back with careful aim.

"Well, what is it that perplexes me?" Levin said to himself, feeling
beforehand that the solution of his difficulties was ready in his
soul, though he did not know it yet.

"Yes, the one unmistakable, incontestable manifestation of the
Divinity is the law of right and wrong, which has come into the
world by revelation, and which I feel within myself, and in the
recognition of which I not so much make myself but, willy-nilly, am
made, one with other men in one body of believers, which is called the
Church. Well, but the Jews, the Mohammedans, the Confucians, the
Buddhists- what of them?" he put to himself the question he had feared
to face. "Can these hundreds of millions of men be deprived of that
highest blessing without which life has no meaning?" He pondered a
moment, but immediately corrected himself. "But what am I
questioning?" he said to himself. "I am questioning the relation to
Divinity of all the different religions of all mankind. I am
questioning the universal manifestation of God to all the world with
all these nebulae. What am I about? To me individually, to my heart
has been revealed a knowledge beyond all doubt, and unattainable by
reason, and here I am obstinately trying to express that knowledge
in reason and words.

"Don't I know that the stars don't move?" he asked himself, gazing
at the bright planet which had shifted its position up to the
topmost twig of a birch tree. "But looking at the movements of the
stars, I can't picture to myself the rotation of the earth, and I'm
right in saying that the stars move.

"And could the astronomers have understood and calculated
anything, if they had taken into account all the complicated and
varied motions of the earth?- All the marvelous conclusions they
have reached about the distances, weights, revolutions, and
perturbations of the heavenly bodies, are only founded on the apparent
motions of the heavenly bodies round the stationary earth, on that
very motion I see before me now, which has been so for millions of men
during long ages- has been and always will be alike, and can always be
verified. And just as the conclusions of the astronomers would have
been vain and uncertain if not founded on observations of the
visible heavens, in relation to a single meridian and a single
horizon, so would my conclusions be vain and uncertain if not
founded on that conception of right, which has been and will always be
alike for all men, which has been revealed to me by Christianity,
and which can always be verified in my soul. The question of other
religions and their relations to Divinity I have no right to decide,
and no possibility of deciding."

"Oh, you haven't gone in then?" he heard Kitty's voice suddenly,
as she came by the same way to the drawing room. "What is it? You're
not worried about anything?" she said, looking intently at his face in
the starlight.

But she could not have seen his face if a flash of lightning had not
hidden the stars and revealed it. In that flash she saw his face
distinctly, and seeing him calm and happy, she smiled at him.

"She understands," he thought; "she knows what I'm thinking about.
Shall I tell her or not? Yes, I'll tell her." But at the moment he was
about to speak, she began speaking.

"Kostia! Do something for me," she said; "go into the corner room
and see if they've made it all ready for Sergei Ivanovich. I can't
very well. See if they've put the new washstand in it."

"Very well, I'll go directly," said Levin, standing up and kissing
her.

"No, I'd better not speak of it," he thought, when she had gone in
before him. "It is a secret for me alone, of vital importance for
me, and not to be put into words.

"This new feeling has not changed me, has not made me happy and
enlightened all of a sudden, as I had dreamed, just like the feeling
for my child. There was no surprise in this either. Whether it is
faith or not- I don't know what it is- but this feeling has come
just as imperceptibly through suffering, and has taken firm root in my
soul.

"I shall go on in the same way, losing my temper with Ivan the
coachman, falling into angry discussions, expressing my opinions
tactlessly; there will be still the same wall between the holy of
holies of my soul and other people, even my wife; I shall still go
on scolding her for my own fright and being remorseful for it; I shall
still be as unable to understand with my reason why I pray, and I
shall still go on praying; but my life now, my whole life apart from
anything that can happen to me, every minute of it is no more
meaningless, as it was before, but it has the positive meaning of
goodness, which I have the power to put into it."



                        THE END