Anna Karenina - LimpidSoft

PART FIVE CHAPTER 20
Chapter 20
THE next day the sick man received the sacrament and extreme unction. During
the ceremony Nikolay Levin prayed fervently. His great eyes, fastened on
the holy image that was set out on a card table covered with a colored napkin, expressed
such passionate prayer and hope that it was awful to Levin to see it. Levin
knew that this passionate prayer and hope would only make him feel more bitterly
parting from the life he so loved. Levin knew his brother and the workings of his
intellect: he knew that his unbelief came not from life being easier for him without
faith, but had grown up because step by step the contemporary scientific interpretation
of natural phenomena crushed out the possibility of faith; and so he knew that
his present return was not a legitimate one, brought about by way of the same working
of his intellect, but simply a temporary, interested return to faith in a desperate
hope of recovery. Levin knew too that Kitty had strengthened his hope by accounts
of the marvelous recoveries she had heard of. Levin knew all this; and it was agonizingly
painful to him to behold the supplicating, hopeful eyes and the emaciated
wrist, lifted with difficulty, making the sign of the cross on the tense brow, and the
prominent shoulders and hollow, gasping chest, which one could not feel consistent
with the life the sick man was praying for. During the sacrament Levin did what he,
an unbeliever, had done a thousand times. He said, addressing God, “If Thou dost
exist, make this man to recover” (of course this same thing has been repeated many
times), “and Thou wilt save him and me.”
After extreme unction the sick man became suddenly much better. He did not
cough once in the course of an hour, smiled, kissed Kitty’s hand, thanking her with
tears, and said he was comfortable, free from pain, and that he felt strong and had an
appetite. He even raised himself when his soup was brought, and asked for a cutlet
as well. Hopelessly ill as he was, obvious as it was at the first glance that he could
not recover, Levin and Kitty were for that hour both in the same state of excitement,
happy, though fearful of being mistaken.
“Is he better?”
“Yes, much.”
“It’s wonderful.”
“There’s nothing wonderful in it.”
“Anyway, he’s better,” they said in a whisper, smiling to one another.
This self-deception was not of long duration. The sick man fell into a quiet sleep,
but he was waked up half an hour later by his cough. And all at once every hope
vanished in those about him and in himself. The reality of his suffering crushed all
hopes in Levin and Kitty and in the sick man himself, leaving no doubt, no memory
even of past hopes.
Without referring to what he had believed in half an hour before, as though
ashamed even to recall it, he asked for iodine to inhale in a bottle covered with perforated
paper. Levin gave him the bottle, and the same look of passionate hope with
which he had taken the sacrament was now fastened on his brother, demanding from
him the confirmation of the doctor’s words that inhaling iodine worked wonders.
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