FIFTY-FIVE

 

 

Chapter 17

 

 

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THE hotel in the provincial town where Nicholas Levin was lying ill was one of those provincial hotels arranged after new and improved models, with the best intentions of cleanliness, comfort and even elegance, but which, owing to the people who use them, very soon degenerate into mere dirty pothouses with pretensions to modern improvements, these very pretensions making them worse than the old-fashioned inns which were simply dirty. This hotel had already reached this stage: everything — the soldier in a dirty uniform smoking a cigarette at the front door, acting as a hall-porter, the dismal and unpleasant ornamental cast-iron staircase, the free and easy waiter in a dirty dress coat, the general room with a dusty bouquet of wax flowers decorating the table, the dust and slovenliness everywhere, mingled with a kind of modern, self-satisfied railway-induced state of bustle. All this caused a feeling of depression in the Levins after their fresh, home life; especially as the air of artificiality about this hotel was quite irreconcilable with what was awaiting them.

 

As usual, after the inquiry as to what priced rooms they desired, it turned out that there was not a single good room vacant: one good room was occupied by a railway inspector, another by a lawyer from Moscow, a third by the Princess Astafyeva from the country. There was just one dirty room to be had, but they were promised that an adjoining one would be free by the evening. Vexed with his wife because his expectations were being realized — namely, that, at the moment of arrival when his heart was seized with agitation at the thought of his brother’s condition, he was obliged to consider her instead of running to him at once — Levin led her to the room.

 

‘Go, go!’ she said with a timid, guilty look at him. He went out silently, and at the very door came upon Mary Nikolavna, who had heard of his arrival but had not dared to enter. She was just the same as he had seen her in Moscow — the same stuff dress without collar or cuffs, and the same kindly, dull, pock-marked face, only somewhat stouter.

 

‘Well? How is he? What is it?’

 

‘Very bad! Does not get up. He was expecting you all the time. He . . . you . . . are with your wife?’

 

For a moment he did not understand the cause of her confusion, but she immediately explained it.

 

‘I will go . . . I will go to the kitchen,’ she brought out. ‘He will be pleased. He heard, and he knows and remembers her abroad.’

 

Levin understood that she referred to his wife, and did not know what to say.

 

‘Come along, come!’ he said.

 

But he had hardly moved when the door opened and Kitty looked out. Levin blushed with shame and vexation at his wife for having placed herself and him in this awkward position; but Mary Nikolavna blushed still more. She shrank together, flushed till tears filled her eyes, and seizing the ends of her shawl began twisting them in her red fingers, not knowing what to say or do.

 

At the first glance Levin saw an expression of eager curiosity in the look with which Kitty gazed at this incomprehensible and terrible woman, but it lasted only an instant.

 

‘Well, how is he? How is he?’ she said, addressing first her husband and then the woman.

 

‘Dear me, we can’t talk in the corridor!’ said Levin, looking crossly at a man who was just passing along with jerky steps, ostensibly on business of his own.

 

‘Well, then, come in,’ said Kitty to Mary Nikolavna, who had regained her self-control; ‘or better still, you go on and send for me,’ she continued, noticing her husband’s frightened look, and then returned to their room. Levin went to his brother.

 

He had not expected what he saw and felt when he reached his brother’s side. He had expected to find him in that state of self-deception which, he had heard, was frequent in consumptive cases and which had so struck him at the time of his brother’s visit to him in the autumn. He had expected to find the physical signs of approaching death more definite: greater weakness, greater emaciation, but still the same sort of condition generally. He had expected to feel the same sorrow at the loss of a loved brother and the same horror of death he had then experienced, but to a greater degree, and had prepared himself for all this; but what he found was quite different.

 

In the dirty little room with a painted dado spotted with spittle, behind the thin partition-wall of which could be heard the sound of voices, in stuffy, smelly, foul air, on a bed drawn away from the wall, lay a body covered with a blanket. One arm of that body lay outside the blanket, and the enormous hand, like a rake, seemed to be attached in some incomprehensible way to a long thin spindle that was quite straight from the end to the middle. The head lay on its side on the pillow. Levin could see the moist thin hair on the temples and the drawn transparent-looking forehead.

 

‘Impossible that this terrible body can be my brother Nicholas,’ he thought. But he drew nearer, saw the face, and doubt was no longer possible. In spite of the dreadful change on the face, Levin had only to glance at those living eyes raised toward him, to notice the slight movement of the mouth beneath the clammy moustache, in order to understand the dreadful truth that this dead body was his living brother.

 

The glittering eyes glanced severely and reproachfully at the brother who was entering, and this glance immediately established living relations between living people. Levin at once felt the reproach in the look fixed on him, and a sense of repentance because of his own happiness.

 

When Constantine took him by the hand, Nicholas smiled. The smile was very faint, hardly perceptible, and in spite of it the stern expression of the eyes did not change.

 

‘You did not expect to find me like this?’ he said, speaking with difficulty.

 

‘Yes . . . no . . .’ said Levin, confusing his words. ‘How is it you did not let me know sooner, I mean at the time of my marriage? I inquired for you everywhere.’

 

He was impelled to speak in order not to remain silent, but did not know what to say, especially as his brother made no reply but only gazed fixedly at him, evidently trying to fathom the meaning of every word. Levin told his brother that his wife had come with him. Nicholas seemed pleased at this, but said he was afraid the condition he was in might frighten her. A silence followed. Suddenly Nicholas moved and began to talk. From his expression Levin expected him to say something specially significant and important, but Nicholas only talked about his health. He found fault with the doctor, and regretted that he could not have a celebrated Moscow doctor; so Levin understood that he was still hoping.

 

Taking advantage of the first moment of silence, Levin got up, wishing to free himself if only for a few minutes from his painful sensations, and said he would fetch his wife.

 

‘All right, and I will have the place cleaned up a bit. It is dirty here, and it smells, I should think. Masha! Tidy up,’ said the invalid with an effort. ‘And when you have finished, go away,’ he added, with a questioning look at his brother.

 

Levin did not reply. He went out and stopped in the corridor. He had said he would bring his wife, but now, analysing the impressions he was experiencing, he made up his mind that he would on the contrary try to dissuade her from entering the sick-room. ‘Why should she too be tortured as I am?’ he reflected.

 

‘Well, how is he?’ Kitty asked with a frightened look.

 

‘Oh, it’s awful! Awful! Why did you come?’ said Levin.

 

Kitty was silent a moment, looking timidly and pitifully at her husband; then she approached and took hold of his elbow with both hands.

 

‘Kostya, take me to him! It will be easier for us to bear it together! Just take me there and then go away,’ she began. ‘Try and realize that for me to see you and not to see him is much more painful. There I can perhaps be of use to him and you. Please let me!’ she entreated as if her happiness depended on it.

 

He was obliged to yield, and having recovered, and quite forgotten Mary Nikolavna, he returned with Kitty to his brother.

 

Stepping lightly and glancing repeatedly at her husband, showing him a brave face full of sympathy, she entered the sick-room, and, turning without haste, noiselessly closed the door. With noiseless steps she advanced toward the bedside, went round so that he need not turn his head, and at once grasping his enormous skeleton hand with her fresh young one, pressed it, and with that sympathetic, quiet animation which gives no offence and is natural only to women, she began to talk to him.

 

‘It was in Soden we met, but we were not acquainted,’ she said. ‘You little thought I should one day be your sister?’

 

‘You would not have known me again?’ he asked, with a smile that had lit up his face at her entrance.

 

‘Oh yes, I should! What a good thing it is that you did send us word! Not a day passed without Kostya’s thinking and being anxious about you.’

 

The sick man’s animation did not last long. She had not finished speaking before that stern reproachful look of jealousy, felt by the dying for the living, settled on his face.

 

‘I’m afraid you are not quite comfortable here,’ she said, turning away from his penetrating glance and looking round the room. ‘We shall have to ask the landlord for another room, and see that we are nearer to each other,’ she said to her husband.

 

 

 

 

 

Chapter 18

 

 

 

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LEVIN could not look at his brother calmly and could not be either natural or tranquil in his presence. When he entered the sick-room his eyes and his attention became clouded without his being conscious of it, and he did not see or distinguish the various details of his brother’s condition. He smelt the terribly foul air, saw the dirt and disorder, the agonizing posture of the body, and heard the groans; but he felt there was no help for it. It never entered his head to consider all these details and imagine how that body was lying under the blanket, how the emaciated, doubled-up shins, loins, and back were placed, and whether it would not be possible to place them more comfortably or do something, if not to make him comfortable, at least to make his condition a little more tolerable. A cold shudder crept down his back when he began to think of those details. He was convinced beyond doubt that nothing could be done to prolong that life or to alleviate those sufferings, and the sick man was conscious of his brother’s conviction that there was no help for him, and this irritated him. This made Levin’s position still harder. To be in the sick-room was torture to Levin, but to be absent from it was still worse. He went out continually on all sorts of pretexts, coming back and going out again, incapable of remaining alone. But Kitty felt and acted quite differently. When she saw the invalid she pitied him, and that pity produced in her woman’s soul not the horror and repulsion which it evoked in her husband but a need for action, for finding out all the particulars of his condition, and a desire to help him. Those very details, the thought of which alone filled her husband with horror, at once arrested her attention. She sent for the doctor, sent to the chemist’s, made the maid she had brought with her help Mary Nikolavna sweep, dust, and wash; and herself washed and scrubbed some articles and spread something under the blanket. At her command things were brought in and taken out of the sick-room. She herself went several times to their own room and, without paying any attention to the people she met, brought back with her sheets, pillow-cases, towels, and shirts.

 

The waiter, who was serving a meal to some engineers in the drawing-room, came up several times at her summons with a cross look on his face, but could not help fulfilling her orders; she gave them with such kindly insistence that it was impossible to disobey her. Levin disapproved of all this, not believing that any good could come of it to the invalid. Above all he was afraid that his brother might get angry about it. But the sick man, though apparently indifferent to it all, was not angry but only ashamed, and on the whole appeared rather interested in what she was doing for him. When Levin opened the door, on his return from the doctor’s whither Kitty had sent him, he saw the invalid at the moment when at Kitty’s command Mary Nikolavna and the waiter were putting a clean shirt on him. The long white skeleton back with the enormous shoulder-blades and protruding ribs and vertebrae was bare, and Mary Nikolavna with the waiter’s help somehow got one of the shirt-sleeves twisted and could not guide the long limp arm into it. Kitty, having hurriedly shut the door behind Levin, was not looking that way; but the invalid moaned and she came toward him.

 

‘Be quick!’ she said.

 

‘Don’t come here,’ muttered the sick man angrily. ‘I can myself. . .’

 

‘What do you say?’ asked Mary Nikolavna. But Kitty had heard, and understood that he felt embarrassed and uncomfortable at being stripped in her presence.

 

‘I’m not looking,’ she said, helping the arm in. ‘Mary Nikolavna, you go round to the other side and put it right,’ she added.

 

‘There is a little bottle in my handbag,’ she went on, turning to her husband. ‘You know, in the side pocket! Please go and get it, and meanwhile everything will be put straight here.’

 

When Levin returned with the bottle he found the invalid arranged in bed and everything around him quite altered. Instead of the foul smell there was an odour of vinegar and of scent, which Kitty — pouting her lips and puffing out her rosy cheeks — was blowing through a little glass tube. There was no trace of dust left about; there was a mat beside the bed; on the table medicine bottles and a bottle of water were neatly placed, also a pile of folded linen which would be required later, and Kitty’s embroidery. On another table by the bedside were a glass of some refreshing drink and some powders. The invalid himself washed and with his hair brushed, lay between clean sheets in a clean shirt, its white collar round his abnormally thin neck, gazing with a new look of hope at Kitty and not taking his eyes off her.

 

The doctor whom Levin had fetched, and whom he had found at a club, was not the one who had hitherto attended Nicholas, with whom the patient was dissatisfied. The new doctor took out a stethoscope and sounded him, shook his head, prescribed some medicine and gave extremely precise instructions about giving the medicine and about diet. He ordered raw or very lightly boiled eggs, and seltzer water with new milk at a certain temperature. When the doctor had gone the patient said something to his brother of which Levin caught only the last words: ‘your Kate’; but by the look he gave her Levin saw that his brother was praising her. He asked ‘Kate’, as he called her, to come nearer.

 

‘I feel much better,’ he said. ‘Had I been with you I should have recovered long ago. How pleasant!’

 

He took her hand and drew it toward his lips, but as if fearful that this might be disagreeable to her he changed his mind, let her hand drop, and merely stroked it. Kitty took his hand in both of hers and pressed it.

 

‘Now turn me over on the left side and go to bed,’ he murmured.

 

No one heard what he said, but Kitty understood him. She understood because her mind incessantly watched for his needs.

 

‘On the other side,’ she said to her husband, ‘he always sleeps on that side. Turn him over. It is unpleasant to call the servants, and I cannot do it. Can you?’ she said, addressing Mary Nikolavna.

 

‘I am afraid to,’ answered Mary Nikolavna.

 

Dreadful as it seemed to Levin to put his arms round that terrible body, to grasp those parts under the blanket which he did not wish to remember, yet submitting to his wife, with that determined expression which she knew, he thrust his arms under the blanket, and despite his great strength was struck by the strange heaviness of those emaciated limbs. While he was turning him, with the enormous lean arm about his neck, Kitty quickly and unostentatiously turned and beat the pillow, and arranged the invalid’s head and the hair that again clung to the temples. The patient retained his brother’s hand in his. Levin felt that he wished to do something with his hand and was pulling at it, and yielded with a sinking heart. Yes, his brother drew the hand to his lips and kissed it. Levin, trembling, choking with sobs and unable to utter a word, left the room.

 

 

 

 

 

Chapter 19

 

 

 

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‘THOU hast hid these things from the wise and prudent, and hast revealed them unto babes,’ thought Levin while talking with his wife that night.

 

He thought of the Gospel text not because he considered himself wise — he did not — but because he could not help knowing that he was more intelligent than his wife and Agatha Mikhaylovna; he could not help knowing that when he thought about death he thought with all the powers of his soul. He knew too that many great and virile minds, whose thoughts on that subject he had read, had pondered it, and yet did not know a hundredth part of what his wife and Agatha Mikhaylovna knew on the subject. Different as were those two women, Agatha Mikhaylovna and Kitty — or ‘Kate’ as Nicholas called her, and as Levin was also fond of calling her now — in that respect they were exactly alike. Both knew with certainty what Life was and what Death was, and though they would have been quite unable not only to answer but even to understand the questions which confronted Levin, neither doubted the importance of those phenomena, and they both had exactly the same outlook upon them — an outlook shared not only by them but by millions of others. The proof that they knew surely what death was, lay in the fact that they knew without a minute’s hesitation how to behave with the dying and did not fear them. But Levin and others, though they were able to say a great deal about death, evidently did not know anything, for they feared it and had no notion what to do when people were dying. Had Levin now been alone with his brother Nicholas, he would have looked at him with horror, and would have waited about in still greater horror not knowing what to do next.

 

More than that, he did not know what to say, how to look, or how to step. To talk of indifferent things seemed an affront, and he could not do it; to talk of death and dismal things was likewise impossible, and it was equally impossible to keep silent. ‘I fear that if I look at him he will think I am watching. If I don’t look, he will imagine I am thinking of something else. If I walk on tiptoe he will be displeased, and yet I am ashamed to tread on the whole of my foot.’ But Kitty evidently did not think and had no time to think of herself. She, prompted by some inner conviction, thought of him, and everything came out right. She talked to him about herself and about her wedding, smiled, sympathized, caressed him, mentioned cases of recovery, and it was all successful, so she evidently knew what she was about. The proof that her and Agatha Mikhaylovna’s behaviour was not instinctive, animal, and unreasoning lay in the fact that they both demanded for the dying man something of greater importance than mere physical care, something that had nothing in common with physical conditions. Agatha Mikhaylovna, speaking of the old man who had died, had said: ‘Well, God be thanked! He received Communion and Extreme Unction; God grant everybody to die so!’ Just in the same way Kitty, besides all her cares about linen, bedsores, and cooling drinks, had managed on the very first day to persuade the invalid of the necessity of receiving Communion and Extreme Unction.

 

When Levin returned to their two rooms for the night he sat with hanging head not knowing what to do. Not only could he not think of supper, of getting ready for the night, of considering what they were to do; he could not even talk to his wife: he was ashamed to. Kitty, on the contrary, was more active than usual and even more animated. She ordered supper to be brought, unpacked their things herself, helped to make the beds, and did not forget to sprinkle insect powder on them. She was in that highly-wrought state when the reasoning powers act with great rapidity: the state a man is in before a battle or a struggle, in danger, and at the decisive moments of life — those moments when a man shows once for all what he is worth, that his past was not lived in vain but was a preparation for these moments.

 

All she did was well done, and before midnight everything was sorted, clean, and neat, so that their apartments showed a resemblance to her own rooms at home: beds made, combs, brushes and looking-glasses laid out, and covers spread.

 

It seemed to Levin that it would be inexcusable to eat, sleep, or even to talk, and he felt that his every movement was improper. She, however, sorted combs and brushes, and did it all in such a way that there was nothing offensive about it.

 

However, they could not eat anything, nor sleep for a long time, and even did not go to bed till very late.