(^12861287)
and will be always alike for all men, which has been revealed to me as
a Christian, and which can always be trusted in my soul. The question
of other religions and their relations to Divinity I have no right to
decide, and no possibility of deciding.”
“Oh, you haven’t gone in then?” he heard Kitty’s voice all at once, as
she came by the same way to the drawing-room.
“What is it? you’re not worried about anything?” she said, looking
intently at his face in the starlight.
But she could not have seen his face if a flash of lightning had not
hidden the stars and revealed it. In that flash she saw his face dis-
tinctly, and seeing him calm and happy, she smiled at him.
“She understands,” he thought; “she knows what I’m thinking about.
Shall I tell her or not? Yes, I’ll tell her.” But at the moment he was
about to speak, she began speaking.
“Kostya! do something for me,” she said; “go into the corner room
and see if they’ve made it all right for Sergey Ivanovitch. I can’t very
well. See if they’ve put the new wash stand in it.”
“Very well, I’ll go directly,” said Levin, standing up and kissing her.
“No, I’d better not speak of it,” he thought, when she had gone in
before him. “It is a secret for me alone, of vital importance for me, and
not to be put into words.
“This new feeling has not changed me, has not made me happy
and enlightened all of a sudden, as I had dreamed, just like the feeling
for my child. There was no surprise in this either. Faith—or not faith—
I don’t know what it is—but this feeling has come just as imperceptibly
through suffering, and has taken firm root in my soul.
“I shall go on in the same way, losing my temper with Ivan the
coachman, falling into angry discussions, expressing my opinions tact-
lessly; there will be still the same wall between the holy of holies of my
soul and other people, even my wife; I shall still go on scolding her for
my own terror, and being remorseful for it; I shall still be as unable to
understand with my reason why I pray, and I shall still go on praying;
but my life now, my whole life apart from anything that can happen to
me, every minute of it is no more meaningless, as it was before, but it
has the positive meaning of goodness, which I have the power to put
into it.”
barré
(Barré)
#1