Anna Karenina - LimpidSoft

PART SEVEN CHAPTER 14
back to the old every-day world, glorified though now, by such a radiance of happiness
that he could not bear it. The strained chords snapped, sobs and tears of joy
which he had never foreseen rose up with such violence that his whole body shook,
that for long they prevented him from speaking.
Falling on his knees before the bed, he held his wife’s hand before his lips and
kissed it, and the hand, with a weak movement of the fingers, responded to his kiss.
And meanwhile, there at the foot of the bed, in the deft hands of Lizaveta Petrovna,
like a flickering light in a lamp, lay the life of a human creature, which had never
existed before, and which would now with the same right, with the same importance
to itself, live and create in its own image.
“Alive! alive! And a boy too! Set your mind at rest!” Levin heard Lizaveta Petrovna
saying, as she slapped the baby’s back with a shaking hand.
“Mamma, is it true?” said Kitty’s voice.
The princess’s sobs were all the answers she could make. And in the midst of
the silence there came in unmistakable reply to the mother’s question, a voice quite
unlike the subdued voices speaking in the room. It was the bold, clamorous, selfassertive
squall of the new human being, who had so incomprehensibly appeared.
If Levin had been told before that Kitty was dead, and that he had died with her,
and that their children were angels, and that God was standing before him, he would
have been surprised at nothing. But now, coming back to the world of reality, he had
to make great mental efforts to take in that she was alive and well, and that the
creature squalling so desperately was his son. Kitty was alive, her agony was over.
And he was unutterably happy. That he understood; he was completely happy in it.
But the baby? Whence, why, who was he?... He could not get used to the idea. It
seemed to him something extraneous, superfluous, to which he could not accustom
himself.
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