Android Karenina - By Count Leo Nikolayevich Tolstoy & Ben H. Winters & Leo Tolstoy Page 0,196

not bear it, that he would burst into tears or run away. Such agony it was to him. And only one hour had passed.

He thought at one moment during this unbearable hour of Socrates. There would be time, he told himself. There would be time to help him, to save him. Tomorrow . . . And his mind then passed over these thoughts, returning to what was before him: to Kitty, and to his child, teetering on the cusp of existence.

This was a time for humans.

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, which would squeeze his hand with extraordinary violence and then push it away—seemed to him hours, and hours seemed to him minutes. 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 trying to reassure him. He saw the old princess too, flushed and overwrought, 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, rifling through some old medical manual, its pages yellowed from generations of disuse; 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.

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 when the alien terror had burst from Nikolai’s chest. But that had been grief—grief and terror—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 inconceivable heights of which it had before had no conception, while reason lagged behind, unable to keep up with it.

He did not know whether it was late or early. The candles had all burned out. Dolly had just been in the study and had suggested to the doctor that he should lie down. There had been a period of repose, and he had sunk into oblivion. He had completely forgotten what was going on now. He heard the doctor’s chatter and understood it. Suddenly there came an unearthly shriek. The shriek was so awful that Levin did not even jump up, but holding his breath, gazed in terrified inquiry at the doctor. The doctor put his head to one side, listened, and smiled approvingly. Everything was so extraordinary that nothing could strike Levin as strange. I suppose it must be so, he thought, and still sat where he was. Whose scream was this? He jumped up, ran on tiptoe to the bedroom, and took up his position at Kitty’s pillow. The scream had subsided, but there was some change now. What it was he did not see and did not comprehend, and he had no wish to see or comprehend. Kitty’s swollen and agonized face, a tress of hair clinging to her moist brow, was turned to him and sought his eyes. Her lifted hands asked for his hands. Clutching his chill hands in her moist ones, she began squeezing them to her face.

“Don’t go, don’t go! I’m not afraid, I’m not afraid!” she said rapidly. “Mamma, take my earrings. They bother me. You’re not afraid?”

She spoke quickly, very quickly, and tried to smile. But suddenly her face was drawn, she pushed him away.

“Oh, this is awful! I’m dying, I’m dying! Go away!” she shrieked, and again he heard that unearthly scream.

Levin clutched at his head and ran out of the room.

“It’s nothing, it’s