Anna Karenina - LimpidSoft

PART SEVEN CHAPTER 14
begged him not to worry himself, and Dolly persuaded him to eat something and led
him out of the room, and even the doctor looked seriously and with commiseration
at him and offered him a drop of something.
All he knew and felt was that what was happening was what had happened nearly
a year before in the hotel of the country town at the deathbed of his brother Nikolay.
But that had been grief– this was joy. Yet that grief and this joy were alike outside all
the ordinary conditions of life; they were loop-holes, as it were, in that ordinary life
through which there came glimpses of something sublime. And in the contemplation
of this sublime something the soul was exalted to inconceivable heights of which it
had before had no conception, while reason lagged behind, unable to keep up with
it.
“Lord, have mercy on us, and succor us!” he repeated to himself incessantly, feeling,
in spite of his long and, as it seemed, complete alienation from religion, that
he turned to God just as trustfully and simply as he had in his childhood and first
youth.
All this time he had two distinct spiritual conditions. One was away from her, with
the doctor, who kept smoking one fat cigarette after another and extinguishing them
on the edge of a full ash tray, with Dolly, and with the old prince, where there was
talk about dinner, about politics, about Marya Petrovna’s illness, and where Levin
suddenly forgot for a minute what was happening, and felt as though he had waked
up from sleep; the other was in her presence, at her pillow, where his heart seemed
breaking and still did not break from sympathetic suffering, and he prayed to God
without ceasing. And every time he was brought back from a moment of oblivion
by a scream reaching him from the bedroom, he fell into the same strange terror
that had come upon him the first minute. Every time he heard a shriek, he jumped
up, ran to justify himself, remembered on the way that he was not to blame, and he
longed to defend her, to help her. But as he looked at her, he saw again that help
was impossible, and he was filled with terror and prayed: “Lord, have mercy on
us, and help us!” And as time went on, both these conditions became more intense;
the calmer he became away from her, completely forgetting her, the more agonizing
became both her sufferings and his feeling of helplessness before them. He jumped
up, would have liked to run away, but ran to her.
Sometimes, when again and again she called upon him, he blamed her; but seeing
her patient, smiling face, and hearing the words, “I am worrying you,” he threw the
blame on God; but thinking of God, at once he fell to beseeching God to forgive him
and have mercy.
He did not know whether it was late or early. The candles had all burned out.
Dolly had just been in the study and had suggested to the doctor that he should lie
down. Levin sat listening to the doctor’s stories of a quack mesmerizer and looking
at the ashes of his cigarette. There had been a period of repose, and he had sunk
into oblivion. He had completely forgotten what was going on now. He heard the
doctor’s chat and understood it. Suddenly there came an unearthly shriek. The
shriek was so awful that Levin did not even jump up, but holding his breath, gazed
in terrified inquiry at the doctor. The doctor put his head on one side, listened,
and smiled approvingly. Everything was so extraordinary that nothing could strike
Levin as strange. “I suppose it must be so,” he thought, and still sat where he was.
655