From the moment he had woken up and realized what was happening, Levin had prepared himself to endure what awaited him, without reflecting, without anticipating, firmly locking up all his thoughts and feelings, without upsetting his wife, but, on the contrary, calming and supporting her. Not allowing himself even to think of what would happen, of how it would end, going by his inquiries about how long it usually lasts, Levin had prepared himself in his imagination to endure and keep his heart under control for some five hours, and that seemed possible to him. But when he came back from the doctor’s and again saw her sufferings, he began to repeat more and more often: ‘Lord, forgive us and help us,’ to sigh and lift up his eyes, and he was afraid that he would not hold out, that he would burst into tears or run away. So tormenting it was for him. And only one hour had passed.
But after that hour another hour passed, two, three, all five hours that he had set for himself as the furthest limit of his endurance, and the situation was still the same; and he still endured, because there was nothing else he could do, thinking every moment that he had reached the final limit of endurance and that his heart was about to break from compassion.
But more minutes passed, hours and more hours, and his feelings of suffering and dread grew and became more intense.
All the ordinary circumstances of life, without which nothing could be imagined, ceased to exist for Levin. He lost awareness of time. Sometimes minutes - those minutes when she called him to her and he held her sweaty hand, which now pressed his with extraordinary force, now pushed him away- seemed like hours to him, and sometimes hours seemed like minutes. He was surprised when Lizaveta Petrovna asked him to light a candle behind the screen, and he discovered that it was already five o‘clock in the evening. If he had been told that it was now only ten o’clock in the morning, he would have been no more surprised. Where he had been during that time he did not know, any more than he knew when things had happened. He saw her burning face, bewildered and suffering, then smiling and comforting him. He saw the princess, red, tense, her grey hair uncurled, biting her lips in an effort to hide her tears; he saw Dolly, and the doctor smoking fat cigarettes, and Lizaveta Petrovna with her firm, resolute and comforting face, and the old prince pacing the reception room with a frown. But how they all came and went, and where they were, he did not know. The princess was now with the doctor in the bedroom, now in the study where a laid table had appeared; then it was not she but Dolly. Then Levin remembered being sent somewhere. Once he was sent to move a table and a sofa. He did it zealously, thinking it was for her, and only later learned that he had prepared his own bed. Then he was sent to the study to ask the doctor something. The doctor answered and then began talking about the disorders in the Duma. Then he was sent to the princess’s bedroom to fetch an icon in a gilded silver casing, and with the princess’s old maid he climbed up to take it from the top of a cabinet and broke the icon lamp; the princess’s maid comforted him about his wife and the icon lamp, and he brought the icon and put it by Kitty’s head, carefully tucking it behind the pillow. But where, when, and why all this happened, he did not know. Nor did he know why the princess took him by the hand and, gazing pitifully at him, asked him to calm down, why Dolly kept telling him to eat something and leading him out of the room, and even the doctor looked at him gravely and commiseratingly and offered him some drops.
He knew and felt only that what was being accomplished was similar to what had been accomplished a year ago in a hotel in a provincial capital, on the deathbed of his brother Nikolai. But that had been grief and this was joy. But that grief and this joy were equally outside all ordinary circumstances of life, were like holes in this ordinary life, through which something higher showed. And just as painful, as tormenting in its coming, was what was now being accomplished; and just as inconceivably, in contemplating this higher thing, the soul rose to such heights as it had never known before, where reason was no longer able to overtake it.
‘Lord, forgive us and help us,’ he constantly repeated to himself, feeling, in spite of so long and seemingly so complete an estrangement, that he was turning to God just as trustfully and simply as in his childhood and early youth.
