Anna Karenina (Penguin) - Leo Tolstoy [407]
‘Good morning!’ the doctor said to him, holding out his hand, as if teasing him with his calmness. ‘Don’t be in a hurry. Well, sir?’
Trying to be as thorough as possible, Levin began to give all the unnecessary details of his wife’s condition, constantly interrupting his story with requests that the doctor come with him at once.
‘Don’t you be in a hurry. You see, I’m probably not even needed, but I promised and so I’ll come if you like. But there’s no hurry. Sit down, please. Would you care for some coffee?’
Levin looked at him, asking with his eyes whether he was laughing at him. But the doctor never even thought of laughing.
‘I know, sir, I know,’ the doctor said, smiling, ‘I’m a family man myself; but in these moments we husbands are the most pathetic people. I have a patient whose husband always runs out to the stable on such occasions.’
‘But what do you think, Pyotr Dmitrich? Do you think it may end well?’
‘All the evidence points to a good outcome.’
‘Then you’ll come now?’ said Levin, looking spitefully at the servant who brought the coffee.
‘In about an hour.’
‘No, for God’s sake!’
‘Well, let me have some coffee first.’
The doctor began on his coffee. The two were silent.
‘The Turks are certainly taking a beating, though. Did you read yesterday’s dispatch?’ the doctor said, chewing his roll.
‘No, I can’t stand it!’ said Levin, jumping up. ‘So you’ll be there in a quarter of an hour?’
‘In half an hour.’
‘Word of honour?’
When Levin returned home, he drove up at the same time as the princess, and together they went to the bedroom door. There were tears in the princess’s eyes and her hands were trembling. Seeing Levin, she embraced him and wept.
‘What news, darling Lizaveta Petrovna?’ she said, seizing the hand of Lizaveta Petrovna, who came out to meet them with a radiant and preoccupied face.
‘It’s going well,’ she said. ‘Persuade her to lie down. It will be easier.’
From the moment he had woken up and realized what was happening, Levin had prepared himself to endure what awaited him, without reflecting, without anticipating, firmly locking up all his thoughts and feelings, without upsetting his wife, but, on the contrary, calming and supporting her. Not allowing himself even to think of what would happen, of how it would end, going by his inquiries about how long it usually lasts, Levin had prepared himself in his imagination to endure and keep his heart under control for some five hours, and that seemed possible to him. But when he came back from the doctor’s and again saw her sufferings, he began to repeat more and more often: ‘Lord, forgive us and help us,’ to sigh and lift up his eyes, and he was afraid that he would not hold out, that he would burst into tears or run away. So tormenting it was for him. And only one hour had passed.
But after that hour another hour passed, two, three, all five hours that he had set for himself as the furthest limit of his endurance, and the situation was still the same; and he still endured, because there was nothing else he could do, thinking every moment that he had reached the final limit of endurance and that his heart was about to break from compassion.
But more minutes passed, hours and more hours, and his feelings of suffering and dread grew and became more intense.
All the ordinary circumstances of life, without which nothing could be imagined, ceased to exist for Levin. He lost awareness of time. Sometimes minutes - those minutes when she called him to her and he held her sweaty hand, which now pressed his with extraordinary force, now pushed him away- seemed like hours to him, and sometimes hours seemed like minutes. He was surprised when Lizaveta Petrovna asked him to light a candle behind the screen, and he discovered that it was already five o‘clock in the evening. If he had been told that it was now only ten o’clock in the morning, he would have been no more surprised. Where he had been during that time he did not know, any more than he knew when things had happened. He saw her burning face, bewildered and suffering,