Leo Tolstoy - Leo Tolstoy - The Complete Novels (The Greatest Novelists of All Time – Book 4)

On getting back from the sick-room to their own two rooms for the night, Levin sat with hanging head not knowing what to do. Not to speak of supper, of preparing for bed, of considering what they were going to do, he could not even talk to his wife; he was ashamed to. Kitty, on the contrary, was more active than usual. She was even livelier than usual. She ordered supper to be brought, herself unpacked their things, and herself helped to make the beds, and did not even forget to sprinkle them with Persian powder. She showed that alertness, that swiftness of reflection comes out in men before a battle, in conflict, in the dangerous and decisive moments of life—those moments when a man shows once and for all his value, and that all his past has not been wasted but has been a preparation for these moments.

Everything went rapidly in her hands, and before it was twelve o’clock all their things were arranged cleanly and tidily in her rooms, in such a way that the hotel rooms seemed like home: the beds were made, brushes, combs, looking-glasses were put out, table napkins were spread.

Levin felt that it was unpardonable to eat, to sleep, to talk even now, and it seemed to him that every movement he made was unseemly. She arranged the brushes, but she did it all so that there was nothing shocking in it.

They could neither of them eat, however, and for a long while they could not sleep, and did not even go to bed.

“I am very glad I persuaded him to receive extreme unction tomorrow,” she said, sitting in her dressing jacket before her folding looking glass, combing her soft, fragrant hair with a fine comb. “I have never seen it, but I know, mamma has told me, there are prayers said for recovery.”

“Do you suppose he can possibly recover?” said Levin, watching a slender tress at the back of her round little head that was continually hidden when she passed the comb through the front.

“I asked the doctor; he said he couldn’t live more than three days. But can they be sure? I’m very glad, anyway, that I persuaded him,” she said, looking askance at her husband through her hair. “Anything is possible,” she added with that peculiar, rather sly expression that was always in her face when she spoke of religion.

Since their conversation about religion when they were engaged neither of them had ever started a discussion of the subject, but she performed all the ceremonies of going to church, saying her prayers, and so on, always with the unvarying conviction that this ought to be so. In spite of his assertion to the contrary, she was firmly persuaded that he was as much a Christian as she, and indeed a far better one; and all that he said about it was simply one of his absurd masculine freaks, just as he would say about her broderie anglaise that good people patch holes, but that she cut them on purpose, and so on.

“Yes, you see this woman, Marya Nikolaevna, did not know how to manage all this,” said Levin. “And…I must own I’m very, very glad you came. You are such purity that….” He took her hand and did not kiss it (to kiss her hand in such closeness to death seemed to him improper); he merely squeezed it with a penitent air, looking at her brightening eyes.

“It would have been miserable for you to be alone,” she said, and lifting her hands which hid her cheeks flushing with pleasure, twisted her coil of hair on the nape of her neck and pinned it there. “No,” she went on, “she did not know how…. Luckily, I learned a lot at Soden.”

“Surely there are not people there so ill?”

“Worse.”

“What’s so awful to me is that I can’t see him as he was when he was young. You would not believe how charming he was as a youth, but I did not understand him then.”

“I can quite, quite believe it. How I feel that we might have been friends!” she said; and, distressed at what she had said, she looked round at her husband, and tears came into her eyes.

“Yes, might have been ,” he said mournfully. “He’s just one of those people of whom they say they’re not for this world.”

“But we have many days before us; we must go to bed,” said Kitty, glancing at her tiny watch.

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The next day the sick man received the sacrament and extreme unction. During the ceremony Nikolay Levin prayed fervently. His great eyes, fastened on the holy image that was set out on a card table covered with a colored napkin, expressed such passionate prayer and hope that it was awful to Levin to see it. Levin knew that this passionate prayer and hope would only make him feel more bitterly parting from the life he so loved. Levin knew his brother and the workings of his intellect: he knew that his unbelief came not from life being easier for him without faith, but had grown up because step by step the contemporary scientific interpretation of natural phenomena crushed out the possibility of faith; and so he knew that his present return was not a legitimate one, brought about by way of the same working of his intellect, but simply a temporary, interested return to faith in a desperate hope of recovery. Levin knew too that Kitty had strengthened his hope by accounts of the marvelous recoveries she had heard of. Levin knew all this; and it was agonizingly painful to him to behold the supplicating, hopeful eyes and the emaciated wrist, lifted with difficulty, making the sign of the cross on the tense brow, and the prominent shoulders and hollow, gasping chest, which one could not feel consistent with the life the sick man was praying for. During the sacrament Levin did what he, an unbeliever, had done a thousand times. He said, addressing God, “If Thou dost exist, make this man to recover” (of course this same thing has been repeated many times), “and Thou wilt save him and me.”

After extreme unction the sick man became suddenly much better. He did not cough once in the course of an hour, smiled, kissed Kitty’s hand, thanking her with tears, and said he was comfortable, free from pain, and that he felt strong and had an appetite. He even raised himself when his soup was brought, and asked for a cutlet as well. Hopelessly ill as he was, obvious as it was at the first glance that he could not recover, Levin and Kitty were for that hour both in the same state of excitement, happy, though fearful of being mistaken.

“Is he better?”

“Yes, much.”

“It’s wonderful.”

“There’s nothing wonderful in it.”

“Anyway, he’s better,” they said in a whisper, smiling to one another.

This self-deception was not of long duration. The sick man fell into a quiet sleep, but he was waked up half an hour later by his cough. And all at once every hope vanished in those about him and in himself. The reality of his suffering crushed all hopes in Levin and Kitty and in the sick man himself, leaving no doubt, no memory even of past hopes.

Without referring to what he had believed in half an hour before, as though ashamed even to recall it, he asked for iodine to inhale in a bottle covered with perforated paper. Levin gave him the bottle, and the same look of passionate hope with which he had taken the sacrament was now fastened on his brother, demanding from him the confirmation of the doctor’s words that inhaling iodine worked wonders.

“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.”