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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, uttered 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 far-away world in
which he had been living for the last twenty-two hours, Levin felt
himself all in an instant borne 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 shak-
ing 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.
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 extra-
neous, superfluous, to which he could not accustom himself.