Anna Karenina Leo Tolstoy (books for 20 year olds txt) 📖

which had nothing in common with physical conditions. Agafea Mihalovna, speaking of the man just dead, had said: “Well, thank God, he took the sacrament and received absolution; God grant each one of us such a death.” Katya in just the same way, besides all her care about linen, bedsores, drink, found time the very first day to persuade the sick man of the necessity of taking the sacrament and receiving absolution.

On getting back from the sickroom to their own two rooms for the night, Levin sat with hanging head not knowing what to do. Not to speak of supper, of preparing for bed, of considering what they were going to do, he could not even talk to his wife; he was ashamed to. Kitty, on the contrary, was more active than usual. She was even livelier than usual. She ordered supper to be brought, herself unpacked their things, and herself helped to make the beds, and did not even forget to sprinkle them with Persian powder. She showed that alertness, that swiftness of reflection which comes out in men before a battle, in conflict, in the dangerous and decisive moments of life⁠—those moments when a man shows once and for all his value, and that all his past has not been wasted but has been a preparation for these moments.

Everything went rapidly in her hands, and before it was twelve o’clock all their things were arranged cleanly and tidily in her rooms, in such a way that the hotel rooms seemed like home: the beds were made, brushes, combs, looking-glasses were put out, table napkins were spread.

Levin felt that it was unpardonable to eat, to sleep, to talk even now, and it seemed to him that every movement he made was unseemly. She arranged the brushes, but she did it all so that there was nothing shocking in it.

They could neither of them eat, however, and for a long while they could not sleep, and did not even go to bed.

“I am very glad I persuaded him to receive extreme unction tomorrow,” she said, sitting in her dressing jacket before her folding looking-glass, combing her soft, fragrant hair with a fine comb. “I have never seen it, but I know, mamma has told me, there are prayers said for recovery.”

“Do you suppose he can possibly recover?” said Levin, watching a slender tress at the back of her round little head that was continually hidden when she passed the comb through the front.

“I asked the doctor; he said he couldn’t live more than three days. But can they be sure? I’m very glad, anyway, that I persuaded him,” she said, looking askance at her husband through her hair. “Anything is possible,” she added with that peculiar, rather sly expression that was always in her face when she spoke of religion.

Since their conversation about religion when they were engaged neither of them had ever started a discussion of the subject, but she performed all the ceremonies of going to church, saying her prayers, and so on, always with the unvarying conviction that this ought to be so. In spite of his assertion to the contrary, she was firmly persuaded that he was as much a Christian as she, and indeed a far better one; and all that he said about it was simply one of his absurd masculine freaks, just as he would say about her broderie anglaise that good people patch holes, but that she cut them on purpose, and so on.

“Yes, you see this woman, Marya Nikolaevna, did not know how to manage all this,” said Levin. “And⁠ ⁠… I must own I’m very, very glad you came. You are such purity that.⁠ ⁠…” He took her hand and did not kiss it (to kiss her hand in such closeness to death seemed to him improper); he merely squeezed it with a penitent air, looking at her brightening eyes.

“It would have been miserable for you to be alone,” she said, and lifting her hands which hid her cheeks flushing with pleasure, twisted her coil of hair on the nape of her neck and pinned it there. “No,” she went on, “she did not know how.⁠ ⁠… Luckily, I learned a lot at Soden.”

“Surely there are not people there so ill?”

“Worse.”

“What’s so awful to me is that I can’t see him as he was when he was young. You would not believe how charming he was as a youth, but I did not understand him then.”

“I can quite, quite believe it. How I feel that we might have been friends!” she said; and, distressed at what she had said, she looked round at her husband, and tears came into her eyes.

“Yes, might have been,” he said mournfully. “He’s just one of those people of whom they say they’re not for this world.”

“But we have many days before us; we must go to bed,” said Kitty, glancing at her tiny watch.

XX

The next day the sick man received the sacrament and extreme unction. During the ceremony Nikolay Levin prayed fervently. His great eyes, fastened on the holy image that was set out on a card-table covered with a colored napkin, expressed such passionate prayer and hope that it was awful to Levin to see it. Levin knew that this passionate prayer and hope would only make him feel more bitterly parting from the life he so loved. Levin knew his brother and the workings of his intellect: he knew that his unbelief came not from life being easier for him without faith, but had grown up because step by step the contemporary scientific interpretation of natural phenomena crushed out the possibility of faith; and so he knew that his present return was not a legitimate one, brought about by way of the same working of his intellect, but simply a temporary, interested return to faith in a desperate hope of recovery. Levin knew too that Kitty had strengthened his hope by accounts of the marvelous recoveries she had heard