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. 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 chatter 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 to 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. Whose scream was this? He jumped up, ran on tiptoe to the bedroom, and took up his position at Kitty’s pillow. The scream had subsided, but there was some change now. What it was he did not see and did not comprehend, and he had no wish to see or comprehend. Kitty’s swollen and agonized face, a tress of hair clinging to her moist brow, was turned to him and sought his eyes. Her lifted hands asked for his hands. Clutching his chill hands in her moist ones, she began squeezing them to her face.
“Don’t go, don’t go! I’m not afraid, I’m not afraid!” she said rapidly. “Mamma, take my earrings. They bother me. You’re not afraid?”
She spoke quickly, very quickly, and tried to smile. But suddenly her face was drawn, she pushed him away.
“Oh, this is awful! I’m dying, I’m dying! Go away!” she shrieked, and again he heard that unearthly scream.
Levin clutched at his head and ran out of the room.
“It’s nothing, it’s nothing, it’s all right,” Dolly called after him.
But they might say what they liked, he knew now that all was over. He stood in the next room, his head leaning against the doorpost, and heard shrieks, howls such as he had never heard before, and he knew that what had been Kitty was uttering these shrieks. He had long ago ceased to wish for the child. By now he loathed this child. He did not even wish for her life now, all he longed for was the end of this awful anguish.
“Doctor! What is it? What is it? By God!” he said, snatching at the doctor’s hand as he came up.
“It’s the end,” said the doctor. And the doctor’s face was so grave as he said it that Levin took “the end” as meaning her death.
Beside himself, he ran into the bedroom. He fell down with his head on the wooden framework of the bed, feeling that his heart was bursting. The awful scream never paused, it became still more awful, and as though it had reached the utmost limit of terror, suddenly it ceased. Levin could not believe his ears, but there could be no doubt; the scream had ceased and he heard a subdued stir and bustle, and hurried breathing, and her voice, gasping, alive, tender, and blissful, uttering softly, “It’s over!”
He lifted his head. With her hands hanging exhausted on the quilt, looking extraordinarily lovely and serene, she looked at him in silence and tried to smile, and could not.
And suddenly, from the mysterious and awful faraway world in which he had been living for the last twenty-two hours, Levin felt himself all in an instant borne back to the everyday world, the New Russia he had set himself in opposition to, glorified though now by such a radiance of happiness that he could not bear it. The strained cords 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 the old princess, like a flickering display light, 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 the princess 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, self-assertive squall of the new human being, who had so incomprehensibly appeared.
Levin was unutterably happy, that he understood. 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.
“Look now,” said Kitty, turning the baby so that he could see it.
All the high ideals, the Golden Hope he had vowed to fight for, were nowhere in his mind as he laid eyes for the first time upon his child. When the boy was yet unborn, he could tell himself that protecting the future of the child meant engaging in furtive rebellion, dedicating himself to an inchoate struggle to recast society, no matter the cost.
But now that he was here, was real, now that this fragile being lay bawling in his arms, all that mattered was holding him close, tending to the child’s needs and to the needs of his brave, beloved wife. The child was all, the family was all.
The aged-looking little face suddenly puckered up still more and the baby sneezed.
CHAPTER 10
STEPAN ARKADYICH’S AFFAIRS were in a very bad way.
The money for two-thirds of his small, inherited groznium pit had all been spent already, and he had borrowed from the merchant in advance at 10 percent discount, almost all the remaining third. The merchant would not give more, not given the recent flurry of rumors about impending alterations to groznium-extraction policy: some said the mines were to be turned into farmland, others that the pits were all to be seized and administered directly by the Department of Extraction. All Stiva’s salary went to household expenses and payment of petty debts that could not be put off. There was positively no money.
All his finances had always been arranged and tended by Small Stiva in consultation with a trusted, old family Class II finance-robot. Without them he was lost in a sea of baffling numbers, which was unpleasant and awkward, and in Stepan Arkadyich’s opinion things could not go on like this. The explanation of the position was, in his view, to be found in the fact that his salary was too small. The post he filled had been unmistakably very good five years ago, but it was so no longer.
Clearly I’ve been napping, and the world has overlooked me, Stepan Arkadyich thought about himself. And he began keeping his eyes and ears open, and toward the end of the winter he had discovered a very good post and had formed a plan of attack upon it, at first from Moscow through aunts, uncles, and friends, and then, when the matter was well advanced, in the spring, he went himself to Petersburg. The post he sought was of overseer of a recently announced committee charged with effecting certain crucial transformations to the Grav. Stiva had little idea of what changes were being proposed, or how they were to be effected, but he felt certain that, nevertheless, he was just the man for the position.
The appointment yielded an income of from seven to ten thousand a year, and Oblonsky could fill it without giving up his position in the Middle Branches. Better still, Stiva had an inside connection to the position, as this mysterious Grav-improvement project reportedly was to be directly overseen by Stiva’s brother-in-law, Alexei. And so it was Karenin whom Stiva set off to see in Petersburg. Besides this business, Stepan Arkadyich had promised his sister Anna to obtain from Karenin a definite answer on the question of her status-had the Ministry accepted their plea for amnesty? Were they to be forgiven, and would Karenin grant Anna a divorce? And begging fifty rubles from Dolly, he set off for Petersburg.