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By Root 1293 0

then smiling and comforting him. He saw the princess, red, tense, her grey hair uncurled, biting her lips in an effort to hide her tears; he saw Dolly, and the doctor smoking fat cigarettes, and Lizaveta Petrovna with her firm, resolute and comforting face, and the old prince pacing the reception room with a frown. But how they all came and went, and where they were, he did not know. The princess was now with the doctor in the bedroom, now in the study where a laid table had appeared; then it was not she but Dolly. Then Levin remembered being sent somewhere. Once he was sent to move a table and a sofa. He did it zealously, thinking it was for her, and only later learned that he had prepared his own bed. Then he was sent to the study to ask the doctor something. The doctor answered and then began talking about the disorders in the Duma. Then he was sent to the princess’s bedroom to fetch an icon in a gilded silver casing, and with the princess’s old maid he climbed up to take it from the top of a cabinet and broke the icon lamp; the princess’s maid comforted him about his wife and the icon lamp, and he brought the icon and put it by Kitty’s head, carefully tucking it behind the pillow. But where, when, and why all this happened, he did not know. Nor did he know why the princess took him by the hand and, gazing pitifully at him, asked him to calm down, why Dolly kept telling him to eat something and leading him out of the room, and even the doctor looked at him gravely and commiseratingly and offered him some drops.

He knew and felt only that what was being accomplished was similar to what had been accomplished a year ago in a hotel in a provincial capital, on the deathbed of his brother Nikolai. But that had been grief and this was joy. But that grief and this joy were equally outside all ordinary circumstances of life, were like holes in this ordinary life, through which something higher showed. And just as painful, as tormenting in its coming, was what was now being accomplished; and just as inconceivably, in contemplating this higher thing, the soul rose to such heights as it had never known before, where reason was no longer able to overtake it.

‘Lord, forgive us and help us,’ he constantly repeated to himself, feeling, in spite of so long and seemingly so complete an estrangement, that he was turning to God just as trustfully and simply as in his childhood and early youth.

All this time he had two separate moods. One away from her presence, with the doctor, who smoked one fat cigarette after another, putting them out against the edge of the full ashtray, with Dolly and the prince, where they talked of dinner, politics, Marya Petrovna’s illness, where Levin would suddenly forget what was happening for a moment and feel as if he were waking up; and the other in her presence, by her head, where his heart was ready to burst from compassion but would not burst, and he prayed to God without ceasing. And each time he was brought out of momentary oblivion by a cry reaching him from the bedroom, he fell into the same strange delusion that had come over him at the first moment; each time, hearing a cry, he jumped up and ran to vindicate himself, remembering on the way that he was not to blame, and then he longed to protect and help her. But, looking at her, he again saw that it was impossible to help, and he was horrified and said: ‘Lord, forgive us and help us.’ And the more time that passed, the stronger the two moods became: the calmer he became, even forgetting her completely, away from her presence, and the more tormenting became her sufferings and his own helplessness before them. He would jump up, wishing to run away somewhere, and run to her.

Sometimes, when she called him again and again, he blamed her. But seeing her obedient, smiling face and hearing the words, ‘I’ve worn you out,’ he blamed God, then, remembering God, he at once asked Him to forgive and have mercy.

XV

He did not know whether it was late or early. The candles were all burning low. Dolly had just come to the study to suggest that the doctor