Anna Karenina (Penguin) - Leo Tolstoy [447]
Indeed, it was not that she guessed (her bond with the baby had not been broken yet), but she knew for certain by the influx of milk in her that he needed to be fed.
She knew he was crying even before she came near the nursery. And he was indeed crying. She heard his voice and quickened her pace. But the quicker she walked, the louder he cried. It was a good, healthy, but hungry and impatient voice.
‘Has he been crying long, nanny?’ Kitty said hurriedly, sitting down on a chair and preparing to nurse him. ‘Give him to me quickly. Ah, nanny, how tiresome you are - no, you can tie the bonnet afterwards!’
The baby was in a fit of greedy screaming.
‘That’s not the way, dearie,’ said Agafya Mikhailovna, who was almost always there in the nursery. ‘He must be tidied up properly. Coo, coo!’ she sang over him, paying no attention to the mother.
The nanny brought the baby to the mother. Agafya Mikhailovna followed them, her face melting with tenderness.
‘He knows me, he does. It’s God’s truth, dearest Katerina Alexandrovna, he recognized me!’ Agafya Mikhailovna out-shouted the baby.
But Kitty did not listen to what she said. Her impatience kept growing along with the baby’s.
Owing to that impatience, it was a long time before matters were put right. The baby grabbed the wrong thing and got angry.
Finally, after a desperate, gasping cry and empty sucking, matters were put right, mother and baby simultaneously felt pacified, and both quieted down.
‘He’s all sweaty, too, poor little thing,’ Kitty said in a whisper, feeling the baby. ‘Why do you think he recognizes you?’ she added, looking sideways at the baby’s eyes, which seemed to her to be peeping slyly from under the pulled-down bonnet, at his regularly puffing cheeks and his hand with its red palm, with which he was making circular movements.
‘It can’t be! If he recognized anyone, it would be me,’ Kitty said in response to Agafya Mikhailovna’s observation, and she smiled.
She smiled because, though she had said he could not recognize anything, she knew in her heart that he not only recognized Agafya Mikhailovna but knew and understood everything, knew and understood much else that no one knew and which she, his mother, had herself learned and begun to understand only thanks to him. For Agafya Mikhailovna, for his nanny, for his grandfather, even for his father, Mitya was a living being who required only material care; but for his mother he had long been a moral creature with whom she had a whole history of spiritual relations.
‘Once he wakes up, God willing, you’ll see for yourself. I do like this, and he just beams all over, the darling. Beams all over, like a sunny day,’ said Agafya Mikhailovna.
‘Well, all right, all right, we’ll see then,’ whispered Kitty. ‘Go now, he’s falling asleep.’
VII
Agafya Mikhailovna tiptoed out; the nanny lowered the blind, chased away the flies from under the muslin bed curtain and a hornet that was beating against the window-pane, and sat down, waving a wilting birch branch over the mother and baby.
‘Ah, this heat, this heat! If only God would send a little rain,’ she said.
‘Yes, yes, shh ...’ was Kitty’s only reply, as she rocked slightly and gently pressed down the plump arm, as if tied with a thread at the wrist, which Mitya kept waving weakly, now closing, now opening his eyes. This arm disturbed Kitty: she would have liked to kiss it but was afraid to, lest she waken the baby. The little arm finally stopped moving and the eyes closed. Only from time to time, going on with what he was doing, the baby raised his long, curling eyelashes slightly and glanced at his mother with his moist eyes, which seemed black in the semi-darkness. The nanny stopped waving and dozed off. From upstairs came the rumble of the old prince’s voice and Katavasov’s loud laughter.
‘They must have struck up a conversation without me,