Anna Karenina - LimpidSoft

PART FIVE CHAPTER 18
Chapter 18
LEVIN could not look calmly at his brother; he could not himself be natural and
calm in his presence. When he went in to the sick man, his eyes and his attention
were unconsciously dimmed, and he did not see and did not distinguish the
details of his brother’s position. He smelt the awful odor, saw the dirt, disorder, and
miserable condition, and heard the groans, and felt that nothing could be done to
help. It never entered his head to analyze the details of the sick man’s situation, to
consider how that body was lying under the quilt, how those emaciated legs and
thighs and spine were lying huddled up, and whether they could not be made more
comfortable, whether anything could not be done to make things, if not better, at
least less bad. It made his blood run cold when he began to think of all these details.
He was absolutely convinced that nothing could be done to prolong his brother’s life
or to relieve his suffering. But a sense of his regarding all aid as out of the question
was felt by the sick man, and exasperated him. And this made it still more painful
for Levin. To be in the sick-room was agony to him, not to be there still worse. And
he was continually, on various pretexts, going out of the room, and coming in again,
because he was unable to remain alone.
But Kitty thought, and felt, and acted quite differently. On seeing the sick man,
she pitied him. And pity in her womanly heart did not arouse at all that feeling of
horror and loathing that it aroused in her husband, but a desire to act, to find out
all the details of his state, and to remedy them. And since she had not the slightest
doubt that it was her duty to help him, she had no doubt either that it was possible,
and immediately set to work. The very details, the mere thought of which reduced
her husband to terror, immediately engaged her attention. She sent for the doctor,
sent to the chemist’s, set the maid who had come with her and Marya Nikolaevna to
sweep and dust and scrub; she herself washed up something, washed out something
else, laid something under the quilt. Something was by her directions brought into
the sick-room, something else was carried out. She herself went several times to her
room, regardless of the men she met in the corridor, got out and brought in sheets,
pillow cases, towels, and shirts.
The waiter, who was busy with a party of engineers dining in the dining hall,
came several times with an irate countenance in answer to her summons, and could
not avoid carrying out her orders, as she gave them with such gracious insistence
that there was no evading her. Levin did not approve of all this; he did not believe
it would be of any good to the patient. Above all, he feared the patient would be
angry at it. But the sick man, though he seemed and was indifferent about it, was
not angry, but only abashed, and on the whole as it were interested in what she
was doing with him. Coming back from the doctor to whom Kitty had sent him,
Levin, on opening the door, came upon the sick man at the instant when, by Kitty’s
directions, they were changing his linen. The long white ridge of his spine, with
the huge, prominent shoulder blades and jutting ribs and vertebrae, was bare, and
Marya Nikolaevna and the waiter were struggling with the sleeve of the night shirt,
and could not get the long, limp arm into it. Kitty, hurriedly closing the door after
Levin, was not looking that way; but the sick man groaned, and she moved rapidly
towards him.
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