sponge and chirruped, making such a queer little contented
sound with his lips, that Kitty and the nurse were not alone
in their admiration. Levin, too, was surprised and delighted.
The baby was taken out of the bath, drenched with water, wrapped in towels, dried, and after a piercing scream,
handed to his mother.
‘Well, I am glad you are beginning to love him,’ said Kitty to her husband, when she had settled herself comfortably
in her usual place, with the baby at her breast. ‘I am so glad!
It had begun to distress me. You said you had no feeling for
him.’
‘No; did I say that? I only said I was disappointed.’
‘What! disappointed in him?’
‘Not disappointed in him, but in my own feeling; I had
expected more. I had expected a rush of new delightful
emotion to come as a surprise. And then instead of that—
disgust, pity…’
She listened attentively, looking at him over the baby,
while she put back on her slender fingers the rings she had
taken off while giving Mitya his bath.
‘And most of all, at there being far more apprehension
and pity than pleasure. Today, after that fright during the
storm, I understand how I love him.’
Kitty’s smile was radiant.
‘Were you very much frightened?’ she said. ‘So was I too,
but I feel it more now that it’s over. I’m going to look at the
oak. How nice Katavasov is! And what a happy day we’ve
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had altogether. And you’re so nice with Sergey Ivanovitch,
when you care to be…. Well, go back to them. It’s always so
hot and steamy here after the bath.’
1419
Chapter 19
Going out of the nursery and being again alone, Levin
went back at once to the thought, in which there was something not clear.
Instead of going into the drawing room, where he heard
voices, he stopped on the terrace, and leaning his elbows on
the parapet, he gazed up at the sky.
It was quite dark now, and in the south, where he was
looking, there were no clouds. The storm had drifted on to
the opposite side of the sky, and there were flashes of lightning and distant thunder from that quarter. Levin listened
to the monotonous drip from the lime trees in the garden,
and looked at the triangle of stars he knew so well, and the
Milky Way with its branches that ran through its midst. At
each flash of lightning the Milky Way, and even the bright
stars, vanished, but as soon as the lightning died away, they
reappeared in their places as though some hand had flung
them back with careful aim.
‘Well, what is it perplexes me?’ Levin said to himself,
feeling beforehand that the solution of his difficulties was
ready in his soul, though he did not know it yet. ‘Yes, the
one unmistakable, incontestable manifestation of the Divinity is the law of right and wrong, which has come into
the world by revelation, and which I feel in myself, and in
the recognition of which—I don’t make myself, but whether
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I will or not—I am made one with other men in one body
of believers, which is called the church. Well, but the Jews,
the Mohammedans, the Confucians, the Buddhists—what
of them?’ he put to himself the question he had feared to
face. ‘Can these hundreds of millions of men be deprived of
that highest blessing without which life has no meaning?’
He pondered a moment, but immediately corrected himself.
‘But what am I questioning?’ he said to himself. ‘I am questioning the relation to Divinity of all the different religions
of all mankind. I am questioning the universal manifestation of God to all the world with all those misty blurs.
What am I about? To me individually, to my heart has been
revealed a knowledge beyond all doubt, and unattainable
by reason, and here I am obstinately trying to express that
knowledge in reason and words.
‘Don’t I know that the stars don’t move?’ he asked himself, gazing at the bright planet which had shifted its position
up to the topmost twig of the birch-tree. ‘But looking at the
movements of the stars, I can’t picture to myself the rotation
of the earth, and I’m right in saying that the stars move.
‘And could the astronomers have understood and calculated anything, if they had taken into account all the
complicated and varied motions of the earth? All the marvelous conclusions they have reached about the distances,
weights, movements, and deflections of the heavenly bodies
are only founded on the apparent motions of the heavenly
bodies about a stationary earth, on that very motion I see
before me now, which has been so for millions of men during long ages, and was and will be always alike, and can
1421
always be trusted. And just as the conclusions of the astronomers would have been vain and uncertain if not founded
on observations of the seen heavens, in relation to a single
meridian and a single horizon, so would my conclusions
be vain and uncertain if not founded on that conception of
right, which has been 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 distinctly, 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 im1422
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portance 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 tactlessly; 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.’
