1122 1123
“Oh, for mercy’s sake!”
“Well, let me drink my coffee, anyway.”
The doctor started upon his coffee. Both were silent.
“The Turks are really getting beaten, though. Did you read
yesterday’s telegrams?” said the doctor, munching some roll.
“No, I can’t stand it!” said Levin, jumping up. “So you’ll be with us
in a quarter of an hour.”
“In half an hour.”
“On your honor?”
When Levin got home, he drove up at the same time as the prin-
cess, and they went up to the bedroom door together. The princess had
tears in her eyes, and her hands were shaking. Seeing Levin, she em-
braced him, and burst into tears.
“Well, my dear Lizaveta Petrovna?” she queried, clasping the hand
of the midwife, who came out to meet them with a beaming and anx-
ious face.
“She’s going on well,” she said; “persuade her to lie down. She will
be easier so.”
From the moment when he had waked up and understood what
was going on, Levin had prepared his mind to bear resolutely what was
before him, and without considering or anticipating anything, to avoid
upsetting his wife, and on the contrary to soothe her and keep up her
courage. Without allowing himself even to think of what was to come,
of how it would end, judging from his inquiries as to the usual duration
of these ordeals, Levin had in his imagination braced himself to bear
up and to keep a tight rein on his feelings for five hours, and it had
seemed to him he could do this. But when he came back from the
doctor’s and saw her sufferings again, he fell to repeating more and
more frequently: “Lord, have mercy on us, and succor us!” He sighed,
and flung his head up, and began to feel afraid he could not bear it,
that he would burst into tears or run away. Such agony it was to him.
And only one hour had passed.
But after that hour there passed another hour, two hours, three, the
full five hours he had fixed as the furthest limit of his sufferings, and
the position was still unchanged; and he was still bearing it because
there was nothing to be done but bear it; every instant feeling that he
had reached the utmost limits of his endurance, and that his heart
would break with sympathy and pain.
But still the minutes passed by and the hours, and still hours more,
and his misery and horror grew and were more and more intense.
All the ordinary conditions of life, without which one can form no
conception of anything, had ceased to exist for Levin. He lost all sense
of time. Minutes—those minutes when she sent for him and he held
her moist hand, that would squeeze his hand with extraordinary vio-
lence and then push it away—seemed to him hours, and hours seemed
to him minutes. He was surprised when Lizaveta Petrovna asked him
to light a candle behind a screen, and he found that it was five o’clock
in the afternoon. If he had been told it was only ten o’clock in the
morning he would not have been more surprised. Where he was all
this time, he knew as little as the time of anything. He saw her swollen
face, sometimes bewildered and in agony, sometimes smiling and try-
ing to reassure him. He saw the old princess too, flushed and over-
wrought, with her gray curls in disorder, forcing herself to gulp down
her tears, biting her lips; he saw Dolly too and the doctor, smoking fat
cigarettes, and Lizaveta Petrovna with a firm, resolute, reassuring face,
and the old prince walking up and down the hall with a frowning face.
But why they came in and went out, where they were, he did not know.
The princess was with the doctor in the bedroom, then in the study,