He raised his head. Her arms resting strengthlessly on the blanket, remarkably beautiful and quiet, she silently looked at him and tried but was unable to smile.
And suddenly from that mysterious and terrible, unearthly world in which he had lived for those twenty-two hours, Levin felt himself instantly transported into the former, ordinary world, but radiant now with such a new light of happiness that he could not bear it. The taut strings all snapped. Sobs and tears of joy, which he could never have foreseen, rose in him with such force, heaving his whole body, that for a long time they prevented him from speaking.
Falling on his knees beside the bed, he held his wife’s hand to his lips, kissing it, and the hand responded to his kisses with a weak movement of the fingers. And meanwhile, there at the foot of the bed, in the deft hands of Lizaveta Petrovna, like a small flame over a lamp, wavered the life of a human being who had never existed before and who, with the same right, with the same importance for itself, would live and produce its own kind.
‘Alive! Alive! And it’s a boy! Don’t worry!’ Levin heard the voice of Lizaveta Petrovna, who was slapping the baby’s back with a trembling hand.
‘Mama, is it true?’ said Kitty’s voice.
She was answered only by the princess’s sobs.
And amidst the silence, as the indubitable reply to the mother’s question, a voice was heard, quite different from all the subdued voices speaking in the room. It was the bold, brazen cry, not intent on understanding anything, of a new human being who had appeared incomprehensibly from somewhere.
Earlier, if Levin had been told that Kitty had died and that he had died with her, and that they had angels for children, and that God was there before them - none of it would have surprised him; but now, having come back to the world of reality, he made great mental efforts to understand that she was alive and well, and that the being shrieking so desperately was his son. Kitty was alive, her sufferings were over. And he was inexpressibly happy. That he understood, and in that he was fully happy. But the baby? Whence, why, and who was he? ... He simply could not understand, could not get accustomed to this thought. It seemed to him something superfluous, an over-abundance, and for a long time he could not get used to it.
XVI
Towards ten o‘clock the old prince, Sergei Ivanovich and Stepan Arkadyich were sitting at Levin’s and, after talking about the new mother, had begun talking about other things as well. Levin listened to their talk and, involuntarily recalling the past, the way things had been before that morning, also recalled himself as he had been yesterday before it all. It was as if a hundred years had passed since then. He felt himself on some inaccessible height, from which he tried to climb down so as not to offend those with whom he was talking. He talked and never stopped thinking about his wife, about the details of her present condition, and about his son, trying to get used to the thought of his existence. The whole world of women, which had acquired a new, previously unknown significance for him after his marriage, now rose so high in his estimation that he was unable to encompass it in imagination. He listened to the conversation about yesterday’s dinner at the club and thought, ‘What’s going on with her now? Is she sleeping? How is she? What is she thinking about? Is our son Dmitri crying?’ And in the middle of the conversation, in the middle of a phrase, he jumped up and started out of the room.
‘Send me word if she can be seen,’ said the prince.
‘Very well, one moment,’ replied Levin and without pausing he went to her room.
She was not sleeping but was talking softly with her mother, making plans for the future christening.
Tidied up, her hair combed, in a fancy cap trimmed with something light blue, her arms on top of the blanket, she was lying on her back, and her eyes, meeting his, drew him to her. Her eyes, bright to begin with, brightened still more as he approached her. In her face there was the same change from earthly to unearthly that occurs in the faces of the dead; but there it is a farewell, here it was a meeting. Again an emotion like that which he had experienced at the moment of the birth welled up in his heart. She took his hand and asked whether he had slept. He was unable to respond and kept turning away, certain of his own weakness.
‘And I dozed off, Kostya!’ she said to him. ‘And I feel so good now.’
She was looking at him, but suddenly her expression changed.
‘Give him to me,’ she said, hearing the baby squealing. ‘Give him here, Lizaveta Petrovna, and he can look at him, too.’
‘Well, there, let papa have a look,’ said Lizaveta Petrovna, picking up and bringing to him something red, strange and wobbly. ‘Wait, we’ll tidy ourselves up first.’ And Lizaveta Petrovna put this wobbly and red thing on the bed, began unwrapping and wrapping the baby, lifting and turning him with one finger and dusting him with something.
