Anna Karenina - Part 7

"Doctor! What is it? What is it? By God!" he said, snatching at

the doctor's hand as he came up.

"It's the end," said the doctor. And the doctor's face was so

grave as he said it that Levin took _the end_ as meaning her death.

Beside himself, he ran into the bedroom. The first thing he saw

was the face of Lizaveta Petrovna. It was even more frowning and

stern. Kitty's face he did not know. In the place where it had

been was something that was fearful in its strained distortion

and in the sounds that came from it. He fell down with his head

on the wooden framework of the bed, feeling that his heart was

bursting. The awful scream never paused, it became still more

awful, and as though it had reached the utmost limit of terror,

suddenly it ceased. Levin could not believe his ears, but there

could be no doubt; the scream had ceased and he heard a subdued

stir and bustle, and hurried breathing, and her voice, gasping,

alive, tender, and blissful, uttered softly, "It's over!"

He lifted his head. With her hands hanging exhausted on the

quilt, looking extraordinarily lovely and serene, she looked at

him in silence and tried to smile, and could not.

And suddenly, from the mysterious and awful far-away world in

which he had been living for the last twenty-two hours, Levin

felt himself all in an instant borne back to the old every-day

world, glorified though now, by such a radiance of happiness that

he could not bear it. The strained chords snapped, sobs and

tears of joy which he had never foreseen rose up with such

violence that his whole body shook, that for long they prevented

him from speaking.

Falling on his knees before the bed, he held his wife's hand

before his lips and kissed it, and the hand, with a weak movement

of the fingers, responded to his kiss. And meanwhile, there at

the foot of the bed, in the deft hands of Lizaveta Petrovna, like

a flickering light in a lamp, lay the life of a human creature,

which had never existed before, and which would now with the same

right, with the same importance to itself, live and create in its

own image.

"Alive! alive! And a boy too! Set your mind at rest!" Levin

heard Lizaveta Petrovna saying, as she slapped the baby's back

with a shaking hand.

"Mamma, is it true?" said Kitty's voice.

The princess's sobs were all the answers she could make. And in

the midst of the silence there came in unmistakable reply to the

mother's question, a voice quite unlike the subdued voices

speaking in the room. It was the bold, clamorous, self-assertive

squall of the new human being, who had so incomprehensibly

appeared.