Anna Karenina - LimpidSoft

PART FIVE CHAPTER 17
him in such a difficult position; but Marya Nikolaevna crimsoned still more. She
positively shrank together and flushed to the point of tears, and clutching the ends
of her apron in both hands, twisted them in her red fingers without knowing what
to say and what to do.
For the first instant Levin saw an expression of eager curiosity in the eyes with
which Kitty looked at this awful woman, so incomprehensible to her; but it lasted
only a single instant.
“Well! how is he?” she turned to her husband and then to her.
“But one can’t go on talking in the passage like this!” Levin said, looking angrily
at a gentleman who walked jauntily at that instant across the corridor, as though
about his affairs.
“Well then, come in,” said Kitty, turning to Marya Nikolaevna, who had recovered
herself, but noticing her husband’s face of dismay, “or go on; go, and then come for
me,” she said, and went back into the room.
Levin went to his brother’s room. He had not in the least expected what he saw
and felt in his brother’s room. He had expected to find him in the same state of selfdeception
which he had heard was so frequent with the consumptive, and which
had struck him so much during his brother’s visit in the autumn. He had expected
to find the physical signs of the approach of death more marked–greater weakness,
greater emaciation, but still almost the same condition of things. He had expected
himself to feel the same distress at the loss of the brother he loved and the same
horror in face of death as he had felt then, only in a greater degree. And he had
prepared himself for this; but he found something utterly different.
In a little dirty room with the painted panels of its walls filthy with spittle, and
conversation audible through the thin partition from the next room, in a stifling atmosphere
saturated with impurities, on a bedstead moved away from the wall, there
lay covered with a quilt, a body. One arm of this body was above the quilt, and the
wrist, huge as a rake-handle, was attached, inconceivably it seemed, to the thin, long
bone of the arm smooth from the beginning to the middle. The head lay sideways
on the pillow. Levin could see the scanty locks wet with sweat on the temples and
tense, transparent-looking forehead.
“It cannot be that that fearful body was my brother Nikolay?” thought Levin. But
he went closer, saw the face, and doubt became impossible. In spite of the terrible
change in the face, Levin had only to glance at those eager eyes raised at his approach,
only to catch the faint movement of the mouth under the sticky mustache,
to realize the terrible truth that this death-like body was his living brother.
The glittering eyes looked sternly and reproachfully at his brother as he drew near.
And immediately this glance established a living relationship between living men.
Levin immediately felt the reproach in the eyes fixed on him, and felt remorse at his
own happiness.
When Konstantin took him by the hand, Nikolay smiled. The smile was faint,
scarcely perceptible, and in spite of the smile the stern expression of the eyes was
unchanged.
“You did not expect to find me like this,” he articulated with effort.
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