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where a table set for dinner suddenly appeared; then she was not
there, but Dolly was. Then Levin remembered he had been sent
somewhere. Once he had been sent to move a table and sofa. He had
done this eagerly, thinking it had to be done for her sake, and only later
on he found it was his own bed he had been getting ready. Then he
had been sent to the study to ask the doctor something. The doctor
had answered and then had said something about the irregularities in
the municipal council. Then he had been sent to the bedroom to help
the old princess to move the holy picture in its silver and gold setting,
and with the princess’s old waiting maid he had clambered on a shelf to
reach it and had broken the little lamp, and the old servant had tried to
reassure him about the lamp and about his wife, and he carried the
holy picture and set it at Kitty’s head, carefully tucking it in behind the
pillow. But where, when, and why all this had happened, he could not
tell. He did not understand why the old princess took his hand, and
looking compassionately at him, begged him not to worry himself, and
Dolly persuaded him to eat something and led him out of the room,
and even the doctor looked seriously and with commiseration at him
and offered him a drop of something.
All he knew and felt was that what was happening was what had
happened nearly a year before in the hotel of the country town at the
deathbed of his brother Nikolay. But that had been grief— this was
joy. Yet that grief and this joy were alike outside all the ordinary
conditions of life; they were loopholes, as it were, in that ordinary life
through which there came glimpses of something sublime. And in the
contemplation of this sublime something the soul was exalted to in-
conceivable heights of which it had before had no conception, while
reason lagged behind, unable to keep up with it.
“Lord, have mercy on us, and succor us!” he repeated to himself
incessantly, feeling, in spite of his long and, as it seemed, complete
alienation from religion, that he turned to God just as trustfully and
simply as he had in his childhood and first youth.
All this time he had two distinct spiritual conditions. One was
away from her, with the doctor, who kept smoking one fat cigarette after
another and extinguishing them on the edge of a full ash tray, with
Dolly, and with the old prince, where there was talk about dinner,
about politics, about Marya Petrovna’s illness, and where Levin sud-
denly forgot for a minute what was happening, and felt as though he
had waked up from sleep; the other was in her presence, at her pillow,
where his heart seemed breaking and still did not break from sympa-
thetic suffering, and he prayed to God without ceasing. And every
time he was brought back from a moment of oblivion by a scream
reaching him from the bedroom, he fell into the same strange terror
that had come upon him the first minute. Every time he heard a shriek,
he jumped up, ran to justify himself, remembered on the way that he
was not to blame, and he longed to defend her, to help her. But as he
looked at her, he saw again that help was impossible, and he was filled
with terror and prayed: “Lord, have mercy on us, and help us!” And as
time went on, both these conditions became more intense; the calmer
he became away from her, completely forgetting her, the more agoniz-
ing became both her sufferings and his feeling of helplessness before
them. He jumped up, would have liked to run away, but ran to her.
Sometimes, when again and again she called upon him, he blamed
her; but seeing her patient, smiling face, and hearing the words, “I am
worrying you,” he threw the blame on God; but thinking of God, at
once he fell to beseeching God to forgive him and have mercy.