Anna Karenina - Part 7

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 ash tray, 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.