Anna Karenina (Penguin) - Leo Tolstoy [293]
On the tenth day after their arrival in the town, Kitty fell ill. She had a headache, vomited and could not leave her bed the whole morning.
The doctor explained that the illness came from fatigue and worry, and prescribed inner peace.
After dinner, however, Kitty got up and, bringing her handwork, went to the sick man as usual. He gave her a stern look when she came in, and smiled contemptuously when she said she had been ill. That day he blew his nose incessantly and moaned pitifully.
‘How do you feel?’ she asked him.
‘Worse,’ he said with difficulty. ‘It hurts!’
‘Where does it hurt?’
‘Everywhere.’
‘It will end today, you’ll see,’ Marya Nikolaevna said in a whisper, but loudly enough for the sick man, whose hearing, as Levin had noticed, was very keen, to hear her. Levin shushed her and looked at his brother. Nikolai had heard, but the words made no impression on him. He had the same tense and reproachful look.
‘Why do you think so?’ Levin asked when she followed him out to the corridor.
‘He’s begun plucking at himself,’ said Marya Nikolaevna.
‘How, plucking?’
‘Like this,’ she said, pulling down the folds of her woollen dress. Indeed, he had noticed that the sick man had been clutching at himself all that day, as if wanting to pull something off.
Marya Nikolaevna’s prediction proved correct. By nightfall Nikolai was already too weak to raise his arms and only looked straight ahead without changing the intently concentrated expression of his gaze. Even when his brother or Kitty leaned over him so that he could see them, his look was the same. Kitty sent for a priest to read the prayers for the dying.
While the priest was reading the prayers, the dying man showed no signs of life; his eyes were closed. Levin, Kitty and Marya Nikolaevna stood by the bed. Before the priest finished reading, the dying man stretched out, sighed and opened his eyes. The priest finished the prayers, put the cross to the cold forehead, then slowly wrapped it in his stole and, after standing silently a minute or two longer, he touched the enormous, cold and bloodless hand.
‘It is ended,’ said the priest, and he was about to step aside; but suddenly the dead man’s matted moustache stirred and clearly in the silence there came from the depths of his chest the sharply distinct sounds:
‘Not quite... Soon.’
And a moment later his face brightened, a smile showed under the moustache, and the assembled women began to busy themselves with laying out the deceased.
The sight of his brother and the proximity of death renewed in Levin’s soul that feeling of horror at the inscrutability and, with that, the nearness and inevitability of death, which had seized him on that autumn evening when his brother had come for a visit. The feeling was now stronger than before; he felt even less capable than before of understanding the meaning of death, and its inevitability appeared still more horrible to him; but now, thanks to his wife’s nearness, the feeling did not drive him to despair: in spite of death, he felt the necessity to live and to love. He felt that love saved him from despair and that under the threat of despair this love was becoming still stronger and purer.
No sooner had the one mystery of death been accomplished before his eyes, and gone unfathomed, than another arose, equally unfathomed, which called to love and life.
The doctor confirmed his own surmise about Kitty. Her illness