Anna Karenina (Penguin) - Leo Tolstoy [465]
Kitty was standing with her sleeves rolled up beside the tub with the baby splashing in it and, hearing her husband’s steps, turned her face to him and called him with her smile. With one hand she supported the head of the plump baby, who was floating on his back, his little legs squirming, and with the other, smoothly tensing her muscles, she squeezed out a sponge over him.
‘Look, look here!’ she said, when her husband came up to her. ‘Agafya Mikhailovna’s right. He recognizes us.’
The thing was that Mitya, that day, obviously, unquestionably, had begun to recognize all his own people.
As soon as Levin came up to the bath, an experiment was performed for him, and it succeeded perfectly. The scullery maid, invited for the purpose, took Kitty’s place and bent over the baby. He frowned and wagged his head negatively. Kitty bent over him and he lit up with a smile, put his hands to the sponge and bubbled with his lips, producing such a pleased and strange sound that not only Kitty and the nanny but Levin, too, went into unexpected raptures.
The baby was taken out of the tub with one hand, doused with water, wrapped in a sheet, dried off and, after a piercing shout, handed to his mother.
‘Well, I’m glad you’re beginning to love him,’ Kitty said to her husband, after settling calmly in her usual place with the baby at her breast. ‘I’m very glad. Because it was beginning to upset me. You said you felt nothing for him.’
‘No, did I say I felt nothing? I only said I was disappointed.’
‘What, disappointed in him?’
‘Not in him but in my own feeling. I expected more. I expected that a new, pleasant feeling would blossom in me like a surprise. And suddenly, instead of that, there was squeamishness, pity ...’
She listened to him attentively over the baby, replacing on her slender fingers the rings she had taken off in order to wash Mitya.
‘And, above all, there’s much more fear and pity than pleasure. Today, after that fear during the thunderstorm, I realized how much I love him.’
Kitty smiled radiantly.
‘Were you very frightened?’ she said. ‘I was, too, but I’m more afraid now that it’s past. I’ll go and look at the oak. And how nice Katavasov is! And generally the whole day was so pleasant. And you’re so good with Sergei Ivanovich when you want to be ... Well, go to them. It’s always so hot and steamy here after the bath ...’
XIX
Leaving the nursery and finding himself alone, Levin at once remembered that thought in which there was something unclear.
Instead of going to the drawing room, where voices could be heard, he stopped on the terrace and, leaning on the rail, began looking at the sky.
It was already quite dark, and in the south, where he was looking, there were no clouds. The clouds stood on the opposite side. From there came flashes of lightning and the roll of distant thunder. Levin listened to the drops monotonously dripping from the lindens in the garden and looked at the familiar triangle of stars and the branching Milky Way passing through it. At each flash of lightning not only the Milky Way but the bright stars also disappeared, but as soon as the lightning died out they reappeared in the same places, as if thrown by some unerring hand.
‘Well, what is it that disturbs me?’ Levin said to himself, feeling beforehand that the resolution of his doubts, though he did not know it yet, was already prepared in his soul.
‘Yes, the one obvious, unquestionable manifestation of the Deity is the laws of the good disclosed to the world by revelation, which I feel in myself, and by acknowledging which I do not so much unite myself as I am united, whether I will or no, with others in one community of believers which is called the Church. Well, but the Jews, the Mohammedans, the Confucians, the Buddhists - what are they?’ He asked himself the same question that had seemed dangerous to him. ‘Can these hundreds of millions of people be deprived of the highest good, without which life has no meaning?’ He pondered, but at once corrected