XXXI.

Running halfway down the staircase, Levin caught a sound he knew, a familiar cough in the hall. But he heard it indistinctly through the sound of his own footsteps, and hoped he was mistaken. Then he caught sight of a long, bony, familiar figure, and now it seemed there was no possibility of mistake; and yet he still went on hoping that this tall man taking off his fur cloak and coughing was not his brother Nikolai.

Levin loved his brother, but being with him was always a torture. Just now, when Levin, under the influence of the thoughts that had come to him, and Agathya Mikhailovna’s hint, was in a troubled and uncertain humor, this meeting with his brother which he had to face seemed particularly difficult. Instead of a lively, healthy visitor, some outsider who would, he hoped, cheer him up in his uncertain humor, he had to see his brother, who knew him through and through, who would call forth all the thoughts nearest his heart, would force him to show himself fully. And that he was not disposed to do.

Angry with himself for so base a feeling, Levin ran into the hall; as soon as he had seen his brother close, this feeling of selfish disappointment vanished instantly and was replaced by pity. Terrible as his brother Nikolai had been before in his emaciation and sickliness, now he looked still more emaciated, still more wasted. He was a skeleton covered by skin.

He stood in the hall, jerking his long thin neck, and pulling the scarf off it, and smiled a strange and pitiful smile. When he saw that smile, submissive and humble, Levin felt something clutching at his throat.

“You see, I’ve come to you,” said Nikolai in a thick voice, never for one second taking his eyes off his brother’s face. “I’ve been meaning to a long while, but I’ve been constantly unwell. Now I’m ever so much better,” he said, rubbing his beard with his big thin hands.

“Yes, yes!” answered Levin. And he felt still more frightened when, kissing him, he felt with his lips the dryness of his brother’s skin and saw close to him his big eyes, full of a strange light.

A few weeks before, Konstantin Levin had written to his brother that through the sale of the small part of the property that had remained undivided, there was a sum of about two thousand roubles to come to him as his share.

Nikolai said that he had come now to take his money and, what was more important, to stay a while in the old nest, to get in touch with the earth, so as to renew his strength like the heroes of old for the work that lay before him. In spite of his exaggerated stoop, and the emaciation that was so striking from his height, his movements were as rapid and abrupt as ever. Levin led him into his study.

His brother dressed with particular care — a thing he never used to do — combed his scanty, lank hair, and, smiling, went upstairs.

He was in the most affectionate and good-humored mood, just as Levin often remembered him in childhood. He even referred to Sergei Ivanovich without rancor. When he saw Agathya Mikhailovna, he joked with her and asked after the old servants. The news of the death of Parfion Denissich made a painful impression on him. A look of fear crossed his face, but he regained his serenity immediately.

“Of course he was quite old,” he said, and changed the subject. “Well, I’ll spend a month or two with you, and then I’m off to Moscow. Do you know, Miaghkov has promised me a place there, and I’m going into the service. Now I’m going to arrange my life quite differently,” he went on. “You know I got rid of that woman.”

“Marya Nikolaevna? Why, what for?”

“Oh, she was a horrid woman! She caused me all sorts of annoyances.” But he did not say what the annoyances were. He could not say that he had driven off Marya Nikolaevna because the tea was weak, and, above all, because she would look after him as though he were an invalid. “Besides, I want to turn over a new leaf completely now. I’ve done silly things, of course, like everyone else, but money’s the last consideration; I don’t regret it. So long as there’s health — and my health, thank God, is quite restored.”

Levin listened and racked his brains, but could think of nothing to say. Nikolai probably felt the same; he began questioning his brother about his affairs; and Levin was glad to talk about himself, because then he could speak without hypocrisy. He told his brother of his plans and his doings.

His brother listened, but evidently he was not interested.

These two men were so akin, so near each other, that the slightest gesture, the tone of voice, told both more than could be said in words.

Both of them now had only one thought — the illness of Nikolai and the nearness of his death — which stifled all else. But neither of them dared speak of it, and so, whatever they said — without uttering the one thought that filled their minds — was all falsehood. Never had Levin been so glad when the evening was over and it was time to go to bed. Never with any outside person, never on any official visit, had he been so unnatural and false as he was that evening. And the consciousness of this unnaturalness, and the remorse he felt at it, made him even more unnatural. He wanted to weep over his dying, dearly loved brother, and he had to listen and keep on talking of how he meant to live.

As the house was damp, and only the one bedroom had been kept heated, Levin put his brother to sleep in his own bedroom, behind a partition.

His brother got into bed, and whether he slept or did not sleep, tossed about like a sick man, coughed, and when he could not get his throat clear, mumbled something. Sometimes when his breathing was painful, he said, “Oh, my God!” Sometimes when he was choking he muttered angrily, “Ah, the devil!” Levin could not sleep for a long while, hearing him. His thoughts were of the most various kinds, but the end of all his thoughts was the same — death.

Death, the inevitable end of all, for the first time presented itself to him with irresistible force. And death, which was here in this loved brother, groaning half-asleep and from habit calling without distinction on God and the devil, was not so remote as it had hitherto seemed to him. It was in himself, too, that he felt this. If not today, tomorrow; if not tomorrow, in thirty years — wasn’t it all the same? And what was this inevitable death — he did not know, had never thought about it, and, what was more, had not the power, had not the courage to think about it.

“I work, I want to do something, but I had forgotten it must all end; I had forgotten — death.”

He sat on his bed in the darkness, crouched up, hugging his knees, and, holding his breath from the strain of thought, he pondered. But the more intensely he thought, the clearer it became to him that it was indubitably so, that, in reality, looking upon life, he had forgotten one little fact — that death will come, and all ends; that nothing was even worth beginning, and that there was no helping it anyway. Yes, it was awful, but it was so.

“But I am alive still. What’s to be done now — what’s to be done?” he asked in despair. He lighted a candle, got up cautiously, went to the looking glass, and began looking at his face and hair. Yes, there were gray hairs about his temples. He opened his mouth. His back teeth were beginning to decay. He bared his muscular arms. Yes, there was strength in them. But Nikolenka, who lay there breathing with what was left of his lungs, had had a strong, healthy body too. And suddenly he recalled how they used to go to bed together as children, and how they only waited till Fiodor Bogdanich was out of the room to fling pillows at each other and laugh, laugh irrepressibly, so that even their awe of Fiodor Bogdanich could not check the effervescing, overbrimming sense of life and happiness. “And now that warped, hollow chest . . . And I, not knowing what will become of me, or wherefore. . . .”

“K-ha! K-ha! Damnation! Why do you keep fidgeting — why don’t you go to sleep?” his brother’s voice called to him.

“Oh, I don’t know; I’m not sleepy.”

“I have had a good sleep, I’m not in a sweat now. Just see, feel my shirt — there’s no sweat, is there?”

Levin felt it, withdrew behind the partition, and put out the candle, but for a long while he could not sleep. The question how to live had hardly begun to grow a little clearer to him, when a new, insolvable question presented itself — death.

“Why, he’s dying — yes, he’ll die in the spring; and how is one to help him? What can I say to him? What do I know about it? I’d even forgotten the very fact of it.”