Anna Karenina

he 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 that lay before him 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 shopman sealed up 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 flurried 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 Pyotr Dmitrievitch (what a great and important personage
he seemed to Levin now, this Pyotr Dmitrievitch, 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.

“Pyotr Dmitrievitch, Pyotr Dmitrievitch!” 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
Levin 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.

“Pyotr Dmitrievitch!” 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, Pyotr Dmitrievitch? Do you suppose it may 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 an hour’s time.”

“Oh, for mercy’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, munching some 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 door 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.

“She’s going on well,” she said; “persuade her to lie down. She will be
easier so.”

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. And 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 position 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 hours more,
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 more 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 fat
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
to move the holy picture in its silver and gold setting, and with the
princess’s old waiting maid he had clambered on a shelf to reach it and
had broken the little lamp, and the old servant had tried to reassure
him about the lamp and about his wife, and he carried the holy picture
and set it at Kitty’s head, carefully tucking it 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 Nikolay. 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 loop-holes, 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 spiritual conditions. One was away
from her, with the doctor, who kept smoking one fat cigarette after
another and extinguishing them on the edge of a full ashtray, with
Dolly, and with the old prince, where there was talk about dinner,
about politics, about Marya 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 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 conditions 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 patient, smiling face, and hearing the words, “I am worrying
you,” he threw the blame on God; but thinking of God, at once he fell
to beseeching God to forgive him and have mercy.