Anna Karenina

In spite of his great interest in Sergei Ivanovich’s plan - something completely new to him and which he had not heard to the end - for how the liberated forty millions of the Slavic world, together with Russia, were to start a new epoch in history, and in spite of his curiosity and alarm about why he had been called, as soon as he left the drawing room and was alone he at once remembered his morning thoughts. And all those considerations about the meaning of the Slavic element in world history seemed so insignificant to him compared with what was happening in his soul that he instantly forgot it all and was transported into the same mood he had been in that morning.

He did not recall his whole train of thought now, as he had done before (he did not need to). He was immediately transported into the feeling that guided him, which was connected with those thoughts, and he found that feeling still stronger and more definite in his soul than before. What had happened to him before, when he had invented some reassurance and had had to restore the whole train of thought in order to recover the feeling, did not happen now. On the contrary, now the feeling of joy and reassurance was all the more alive, and his thought could not keep up with it.

He walked across the terrace and looked at two stars appearing in the already darkening sky, and suddenly remembered: ‘Yes, when I was looking at the sky and thinking that the vault I see is not an untruth, there was something I didn’t think through, something I hid from myself,’ he thought. ‘But whatever it was, there can be no objection. I only have to think and everything will be explained!’

As he was going into the nursery, he remembered what he had hidden from himself. It was that if the main proof of the Deity is His revelation of what is good, then why was this revelation limited to the Christian Church alone? What relation did the beliefs of the Buddhists, the Mohammedans, who also confess and do good, have to that revelation?

It seemed to him that he had the answer to that question, but before he had time to formulate it for himself, he was already in the nursery.

Kitty was standing with her sleeves rolled up beside the tub with the baby splashing in it and, hearing her husband’s steps, turned her face to him and called him with her smile. With one hand she supported the head of the plump baby, who was floating on his back, his little legs squirming, and with the other, smoothly tensing her muscles, she squeezed out a sponge over him.

‘Look, look here!’ she said, when her husband came up to her. ‘Agafya Mikhailovna’s right. He recognizes us.’

The thing was that Mitya, that day, obviously, unquestionably, had begun to recognize all his own people.

As soon as Levin came up to the bath, an experiment was performed for him, and it succeeded perfectly. The scullery maid, invited for the purpose, took Kitty’s place and bent over the baby. He frowned and wagged his head negatively. Kitty bent over him and he lit up with a smile, put his hands to the sponge and bubbled with his lips, producing such a pleased and strange sound that not only Kitty and the nanny but Levin, too, went into unexpected raptures.

The baby was taken out of the tub with one hand, doused with water, wrapped in a sheet, dried off and, after a piercing shout, handed to his mother.

‘Well, I’m glad you’re beginning to love him,’ Kitty said to her husband, after settling calmly in her usual place with the baby at her breast. ‘I’m very glad. Because it was beginning to upset me. You said you felt nothing for him.’

‘No, did I say I felt nothing? I only said I was disappointed.’

‘What, disappointed in him?’

‘Not in him but in my own feeling. I expected more. I expected that a new, pleasant feeling would blossom in me like a surprise. And suddenly, instead of that, there was squeamishness, pity ...’

She listened to him attentively over the baby, replacing on her slender fingers the rings she had taken off in order to wash Mitya.

‘And, above all, there’s much more fear and pity than pleasure. Today, after that fear during the thunderstorm, I realized how much I love him.’

Kitty smiled radiantly.

‘Were you very frightened?’ she said. ‘I was, too, but I’m more afraid now that it’s past. I’ll go and look at the oak. And how nice Katavasov is! And generally the whole day was so pleasant. And you’re so good with Sergei Ivanovich when you want to be ... Well, go to them. It’s always so hot and steamy here after the bath ...’

XIX

Leaving the nursery and finding himself alone, Levin at once remembered that thought in which there was something unclear.

Instead of going to the drawing room, where voices could be heard, he stopped on the terrace and, leaning on the rail, began looking at the sky.