When he returned with the vial, Levin found the sick man lying down and everything around him completely changed. The heavy smell was replaced by the smell of vinegar and scent, which Kitty, her lips pursed and her red cheeks puffed out, was spraying through a little pipe. No dust could be seen anywhere; there was a rug beside the bed. Vials and a carafe stood neatly on the table, where the necessary linen lay folded, along with Kitty’s broderie anglaise. On the other table, by the sick-bed, were drink, a candle and powders. The sick man himself, washed and combed, lay on clean sheets, on high-propped pillows, in a clean shirt, its white collar encircling his unnaturally thin neck, and looked at Kitty, not taking his eyes off her, with a new expression of hope.
The doctor brought by Levin, who had found him at his club, was not the one who had treated Nikolai Levin and with whom he was displeased. The new doctor took out a little tube and listened to the patient’s chest, shook his head, wrote a prescription, and explained with particular thoroughness, first, how to take the medicine, then what diet to observe. He advised eggs, raw or slightly boiled, and seltzer water with fresh milk at a certain temperature. When the doctor left, the sick man said something to his brother; but Levin heard only the last words: ‘your Katia’, and by the look he gave her, Levin understood that he was praising her. He beckoned to Katia, as he called her, to come over.
‘I’m much better already,’ he said. ‘With you I’d have recovered long ago. How nice!’ He took her hand and drew it towards his lips, but, as if fearing it would be unpleasant for her, changed his mind, let go and only stroked it. Kitty took his hand in both of hers and pressed it.
‘Now turn me on my left side and go to bed,’ he said.
No one made out what he said, only Kitty understood him. She understood, because her thought constantly followed what he needed.
‘On the other side,’ she said to her husband, ‘he always sleeps on that side. Turn him, it’s unpleasant to call the servants. I can’t do it. Can you?’she turned to Marya Nikolaevna.
‘I’m scared,’ answered Marya Nikolaevna.
Frightening as it was for Levin to put his arms around that frightening body, to hold those places under the blanket that he did not want to know about, he yielded to his wife’s influence, made the resolute face she knew so well, put his arms under the blanket and took hold of him, but, in spite of his strength, he was amazed at the strange heaviness of those wasted limbs. As he turned him over, feeling an enormous, emaciated arm around his neck, Kitty quickly, inaudibly, turned the pillow over, plumped it up, and straightened the sick man’s head and his thin hair, again stuck to his temple.
The sick man kept his brother’s hand in his own. Levin felt that he wanted to do something with his hand and was drawing it somewhere. Levin yielded with a sinking heart. Yes, he drew it to his mouth and kissed it. Levin shook with sobs and, unable to get a word out, left the room.
XIX
‘Hidden from the wise and revealed unto babes and the imprudent.’29 So Levin thought about his wife as he talked with her that evening.
Levin was thinking of the Gospel saying not because he considered himself wise. He did not consider himself wise, but he could not help knowing that he was more intelligent than his wife or Agafya Mikhailovna, and he could not help knowing that when he thought about death, he thought about it with all the forces of his soul. He also knew that many great masculine minds, whose thoughts about it he had read, had pondered death and yet did not know a hundredth part of what his wife and Agafya Mikhailovna knew about it. Different as these two women were - Agafya Mikhailovna and Katia, as his brother Nikolai called her and as Levin now especially liked to call her - they were perfectly alike in this. Both unquestionably knew what life was and what death was, and though they would have been unable to answer and would not even have understood the questions that presented themselves to Levin, neither had any doubt about the meaning of this phenomenon and looked at it in exactly the same way, not only between themselves, but sharing this view with millions of other people. The proof that they knew firmly what death was lay in their knowing, without a moment’s doubt, how to act with dying people and not being afraid of them. While Levin and others, though they could say a lot about death, obviously did not know, because they were afraid of death and certainly had no idea what needed to be done when people were dying. If Levin had been alone now with his brother Nikolai, he would have looked at him with horror, and would have waited with still greater horror, unable to do anything else.
