Anna Karenina (Penguin) - Leo Tolstoy [464]
‘I swear it’s not my fault. I was just going to leave when he began acting up. We had to change him. We just...’ Kitty began excusing herself.
Mitya was safe, dry, and had slept through it all.
‘Well, thank God! I don’t know what I’m saying!’
They gathered up the wet napkins; the nanny took the baby out and carried him. Levin walked beside his wife and, guilty on account of his vexation, squeezed her hand in secret from the nanny.
XVIII
Throughout the day, during the most varied conversations, in which he took part as if only with the external part of his mind, Levin, despite his disappointment in the change that was supposed to take place in him, never ceased joyfully sensing the fullness of his heart.
After the rain it was too wet to go for a walk; besides, the storm clouds never left the horizon and, now here, now there, passed thundering and black across the edges of the sky. The whole company spent the rest of the day at home.
No more arguments started, and, on the contrary, after dinner everyone was in the best of spirits.
Katavasov first made the ladies laugh with his original jokes, which people always liked so much on first making his acquaintance, but then, prompted by Sergei Ivanovich, he told them his very interesting observations on the differences of character and even of physiognomy between female and male house flies and on their life. Sergei Ivanovich was also merry and over tea, prompted by his brother, expounded his view of the future of the Eastern question,14 so simply and well that everyone listened with delight.
Only Kitty could not listen to the end. She was called to bathe Mitya.
A few minutes after Kitty had left, Levin, too, was called to her in the nursery.
Leaving his tea, and also regretting the interruption of the interesting conversation, and at the same time worrying about why he had been called, since that happened only on important occasions, Levin went to the nursery.
In spite of his great interest in Sergei Ivanovich’s plan - something completely new to him and which he had not heard to the end - for how the liberated forty millions of the Slavic world, together with Russia, were to start a new epoch in history, and in spite of his curiosity and alarm about why he had been called, as soon as he left the drawing room and was alone he at once remembered his morning thoughts. And all those considerations about the meaning of the Slavic element in world history seemed so insignificant to him compared with what was happening in his soul that he instantly forgot it all and was transported into the same mood he had been in that morning.
He did not recall his whole train of thought now, as he had done before (he did not need to). He was immediately transported into the feeling that guided him, which was connected with those thoughts, and he found that feeling still stronger and more definite in his soul than before. What had happened to him before, when he had invented some reassurance and had had to restore the whole train of thought in order to recover the feeling, did not happen now. On the contrary, now the feeling of joy and reassurance was all the more alive, and his thought could not keep up with it.
He walked across the terrace and looked at two stars appearing in the already darkening sky, and suddenly remembered: ‘Yes, when I was looking at the sky and thinking that the vault I see is not an untruth, there was something I didn’t think through, something I hid from myself,’ he thought. ‘But whatever it was, there can be no objection. I only have to think and everything will be explained!’
As he was going into the nursery, he remembered what he had hidden from himself. It was that if the main proof of the Deity is His revelation of what is good, then why was this revelation limited to the Christian Church alone? What relation did the beliefs of the Buddhists, the Mohammedans, who also confess and do good, have to that revelation?
It seemed to him that he had the answer to that question,