Anna Karenina - Part 7

"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.