780 781
promised that another should be empty by the evening. Feeling angry
with his wife because what he had expected had come to pass, which
was that at the moment of arrival, when his heart throbbed with emo-
tion and anxiety to know how his brother was getting on, he should
have to be seeing after her, instead of rushing straight to his brother,
Levin conducted her to the room assigned them.
“Go, do go!” she said, looking at him with timid and guilty eyes.
He went out of the door without a word, and at once stumbled over
Marya Nikolaevna, who had heard of his arrival and had not dared to
go in to see him. She was just the same as when he saw her in Moscow;
the same woolen gown, and bare arms and neck, and the same good-
naturedly stupid, pockmarked face, only a little plumper.
“Well, how is he? how is he?”
“Very bad. He can’t get up. He has kept expecting you. He.... Are
you...with your wife?”
Levin did not for the first moment understand what it was con-
fused her, but she immediately enlightened him.
“I’ll go away. I’ll go down to the kitchen,” she brought out. “Nikolay
Dmitrievitch will be delighted. He heard about it, and knows your
lady, and remembers her abroad.”
Levin realized that she meant his wife, and did not know what
answer to make.
“Come along, come along to him!” he said.
But as soon as he moved, the door of his room opened and Kitty
peeped out. Levin crimsoned both from shame and anger with his
wife, who had put herself and him in such a difficult position; but
Marya Nikolaevna crimsoned still more. She positively shrank to-
gether and flushed to the point of tears, and clutching the ends of her
apron in both hands, twisted them in her red fingers without knowing
what to say and what to do.
For the first instant Levin saw an expression of eager curiosity in
the eyes with which Kitty looked at this awful woman, so incompre-
hensible to her; but it lasted only a single instant.
“Well! how is he?” she turned to her husband and then to her.
“But one can’t go on talking in the passage like this!” Levin said,
looking angrily at a gentleman who walked jauntily at that instant
across the corridor, as though about his affairs.
“Well then, come in,” said Kitty, turning to Marya Nikolaevna, who
had recovered herself, but noticing her husband’s face of dismay, “or go
on; go, and then come for me,” she said, and went back into the room.
Levin went to his brother’s room. He had not in the least expected
what he saw and felt in his brother’s room. He had expected to find
him in the same state of self-deception which he had heard was so
frequent with the consumptive, and which had struck him so much
during his brother’s visit in the autumn. He had expected to find the
physical signs of the approach of death more marked—greater weak-
ness, greater emaciation, but still almost the same condition of things.
He had expected himself to feel the same distress at the loss of the
brother he loved and the same horror in face of death as he had felt
then, only in a greater degree. And he had prepared himself for this;
but he found something utterly different.
In a little dirty room with the painted panels of its walls filthy with
spittle, and conversation audible through the thin partition from the
next room, in a stifling atmosphere saturated with impurities, on a
bedstead moved away from the wall, there lay covered with a quilt, a
body. One arm of this body was above the quilt, and the wrist, huge as
a rake-handle, was attached, inconceivably it seemed, to the thin, long
bone of the arm smooth from the beginning to the middle. The head