The sight of his brother and the proximity of death renewed in Levin’s soul that feeling of horror at the inscrutability and, with that, the nearness and inevitability of death, which had seized him on that autumn evening when his brother had come for a visit. The feeling was now stronger than before; he felt even less capable than before of understanding the meaning of death, and its inevitability appeared still more horrible to him; but now, thanks to his wife’s nearness, the feeling did not drive him to despair: in spite of death, he felt the necessity to live and to love. He felt that love saved him from despair and that under the threat of despair this love was becoming still stronger and purer.
No sooner had the one mystery of death been accomplished before his eyes, and gone unfathomed, than another arose, equally unfathomed, which called to love and life.
The doctor confirmed his own surmise about Kitty. Her illness was pregnancy.
XXI
From the moment when Alexei Alexandrovich understood from his talks with Betsy and Stepan Arkadyich that only one thing was required of him, that he leave his wife alone and not bother her with his presence, and that his wife herself wished it, he felt so lost that he could decide nothing by himself, not knowing what he wanted now, and, giving himself into the hands of those who took such pleasure in looking after his affairs, he agreed to everything. Only when Anna had already left his house and the English governess had sent to ask him if she was to dine with him or separately did he understand his situation clearly for the first time, and it horrified him.
The most difficult thing in that situation was that he simply could not connect and reconcile his past with what there was now. It was not the past when he had lived happily with his wife that puzzled him. He had already suffered through the transition from that past to the knowledge of his wife’s unfaithfulness; that state had been painful but comprehensible to him. If his wife, declaring her unfaithfulness, had then left him, he would have been grieved, unhappy, but he would not have been in this hopeless, incomprehensible situation which he now felt himself to be in. He simply could not reconcile his recent forgiveness, his tenderness, his love for his sick wife and another man’s child, with what there was now-that is, when he, as if in reward for it all, found himself alone, disgraced, derided, needed by none and despised by all.
For the first two days after his wife’s departure, Alexei Alexandrovich received petitioners, his office manager, went to the committee, and came out to eat in the dining room as usual. Without realizing why he was doing it, he strained all his inner forces during those two days merely to look calm and even indifferent. In response to questions about what to do with Anna Arkadyevna’s rooms and belongings, he made great efforts to give himself the look of a man for whom what had happened had not been unforeseen and had nothing extraordinary about it, and he achieved his goal: no one could notice any signs of despair in him. But on the third day after her departure, when Kornei handed him a bill from a fashion shop that Anna had forgotten to pay, and reported that the shop assistant was there himself, Alexei Alexandrovich ordered the assistant to be shown in.
‘Excuse me, your excellency, for venturing to trouble you. But if you would prefer to have us deal with her excellency, be so kind as to inform us of her address.’
Alexei Alexandrovich fell to pondering, as it seemed to the shop assistant, and suddenly turned and sat down at his desk. His head lowered on to his hands, he sat for a long time in that position, made several attempts to start talking and stopped.
Understanding his master’s feelings, Kornei asked the assistant to come some other time. Left alone again, Alexei Alexandrovich realized that he was no longer able to maintain the role of firmness and calmness. He cancelled the waiting carriage, ordered that no one be received, and did not appear for dinner.
He felt that he could not maintain himself against the general pressure of contempt and callousness that he saw clearly in the face of this assistant, and of Kornei, and of everyone without exception that he had met in those two days. He felt that he could not divert people’s hatred from himself, because the reason for that hatred was not that he was bad (then he could have tried to be better), but that he was shamefully and repulsively unhappy. For that, for the very fact that his heart was wounded, they would be merciless towards him; people would destroy him, as dogs kill a wounded dog howling with pain. He knew that the only salvation from people was to conceal his wounds from them, and for two days he had tried unconsciously to do that, but now he felt that he was no longer able to keep up this unequal struggle.
