Anna Karenina - LimpidSoft

PART FIVE CHAPTER 20
“Is Katya not here?” he gasped, looking round while Levin reluctantly assented
to the doctor’s words. “No; so I can say it.... It was for her sake I went through that
farce. She’s so sweet; but you and I can’t deceive ourselves. This is what I believe
in,” he said, and, squeezing the bottle in his bony hand, he began breathing over it.
At eight o’clock in the evening Levin and his wife were drinking tea in their room
when Marya Nikolaevna ran in to them breathlessly. She was pale, and her lips were
quivering. “He is dying!” she whispered. “I’m afraid will die this minute.”
Both of them ran to him. He was sitting raised up with one elbow on the bed, his
long back bent, and his head hanging low.
“How do you feel?” Levin asked in a whisper, after a silence.
“I feel I’m setting off,” Nikolay said with difficulty, but with extreme distinctness,
screwing the words out of himself. He did not raise his head, but simply turned
his eyes upwards, without their reaching his brother’s face. “Katya, go away!” he
added.
Levin jumped up, and with a peremptory whisper made her go out.
“I’m setting off,” he said again.
“Why do you think so?” said Levin, so as to say something.
“Because I’m setting off,” he repeated, as though he had a liking for the phrase.
“It’s the end.”
Marya Nikolaevna went up to him.
“You had better lie down; you’d be easier,” she said.
“I shall lie down soon enough,” he pronounced slowly, “when I’m dead,” he said
sarcastically, wrathfully. “Well, you can lay me down if you like.”
Levin laid his brother on his back, sat down beside him, and gazed at his face,
holding his breath. The dying man lay with closed eyes, but the muscles twitched
from time to time on his forehead, as with one thinking deeply and intensely. Levin
involuntarily thought with him of what it was that was happening to him now, but
in spite of all his mental efforts to go along with him he saw by the expression of that
calm, stern face that for the dying man all was growing clearer and clearer that was
still as dark as ever for Levin.
“Yes, yes, so,” the dying man articulated slowly at intervals. “Wait a little.” He
was silent. “Right!” he pronounced all at once reassuringly, as though all were
solved for him. “O Lord!” he murmured, and sighed deeply.
Marya Nikolaevna felt his feet. “They’re getting cold,” she whispered.
For a long while, a very long while it seemed to Levin, the sick man lay motionless.
But he was still alive, and from time to time he sighed. Levin by now was exhausted
from mental strain. He felt that, with no mental effort, could he understand what
it was that was right. He could not even think of the problem of death itself, but
with no will of his own thoughts kept coming to him of what he had to do next;
closing the dead man’s eyes, dressing him, ordering the coffin. And, strange to say,
he felt utterly cold, and was not conscious of sorrow nor of loss, less still of pity for
his brother. If he had any feeling for his brother at that moment, it was envy for the
knowledge the dying man had now that he could not have.
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