"A silence followed. She was still drawing with the chalk on the table. Her eyes were shining with a soft light. Under the influence of her mood, he was pervaded with an increasing feeling of happiness.
" 'Akh! I have scrawled all over the table!' she said, and laying down the chalk, she made a movement as though to get up.
" 'What! Shall I be left alone—without her?' he thought with horror, and he took the chalk. 'Wait a minute,' he said, 'I've long wanted to ask you one thing.'
"He looked straight into her friendly, though frightened eyes.
" 'Please ask it.'
" 'Here,' he said; and he wrote the initial letters w,y, s, n, d,y,m,n. These letters meant, 'When you said no, did you mean never?' There seemed no likelihood that she could make out this complicated sentence; but he looked at her as though his 105
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life depended on her understanding the words. She glanced at him seriously, then puckered her brow and began to read.
Once or twice she stole a look at him, as though asking him, 'Is it what I think?'
" 'I understand,' she said, flushing a little. "'What is this word?' he said, pointing to the n that stood for never.
" 'It means never,' she said; 'but that's not true!' "He quickly rubbed out what he had written, gave her the chalk, and stood up. She wrote, t, i, c, n, a, d. . . . It meant, 'Then I could not answer differently.'
"He glanced at her questioningly, timidly. " ' Only then?' 'Yes,' her smile answered. "'And now?' he asked.
"'Well, read this,' she said. She wrote the initial letters f, a, f. This meant, 'Forget and forgive.' "
All this is a little far fetched. Although, no doubt, love may work wonders and bridge the abyss between minds and present cases of tender telepathy — still such detailed thought-reading, even in Russian, is not quite convincing. However, the gestures are charming and the atmosphere of the scene artistically true.
Tolstoy stood for the natural life. Nature, alias God, had decreed that the human female should experience more pain in childbirth than, say, a porcupine or a whale. Therefore Tolstoy was violently opposed to the elimination of this pain.
In Look magazine, a poor relation of Life, of April 8, 1952, there is a series of photos under the heading, "I Photographed my Baby's Birth." A singularly unattractive baby smirks in a corner of the page. Says the caption : Clicking her own camera as she lies on the delivery table, Mrs. A. H. Heusinkveld, a photography-writer (whatever that is) of Cedar Rapids, Iowa, records (says the caption) these extraordinary views of the birth of her first baby—from the early labor pains to the baby's first cry.
What does she take in the way of pictures? For instance: "Husband [wearing a handpainted philistine tie, with a dejected expression on his simple face] visits wife in the midst of her pains" or "Mrs. Heusinkveld shoots Sister Mary who sprays patient with disinfectants."
Tolstoy would have violently objected to all this.
Except for a little opium, and that did not help much, no anaesthetics were used in those days for relieving the pains of childbirth. The year is 1875, and all over the world women were delivered in the same way as two thousand years ago.
Tolstoy's theme here is a double one, first, the beauty of nature's drama; and second, its mystery and terror as perceived by Lyovin. Modern methods of confinement —anaesthetics and hospitalization—would have made this great chapter 15 of part seven impossible, and the dulling of natural pain would have seemed quite wrong to Tolstoy the Christian. Kitty was having her baby at home, of course, Lyovin wanders about the house.
"He did not know whether it was late or early. The candles had all burned out. . . . He sat listening to the doctor's small talk.
. . . Suddenly there came an unearthly shriek from Kitty's room. The shriek was so awful that he did not even start but gazed in terrified inquiry at the doctor. The doctor put his head on one side, listened, and smiled approvingly. Everything was so extraordinary that nothing could strike Lyovin as strange. . . . Presently he tiptoed to the bedroom, edged around the midwife [Elizaveta] and Kitty's mother, and stood at Kitty's pillow. The scream had subsided but there was some change now. What it was he did not see and did not understand, and had no wish to see or understand. . . . Kitty's swollen and agonized face, a tress of hair clinging to her moist temple, was turned to him. Her eyes sought his eyes, her lifted hands asked for his hands. Clutching his cold hands in her hot ones, she began squeezing them to her face.
" 'Don't go, don't go! I am not afraid, I am not afraid. Mamma, take off my earrings, they bother me. . . .' [List these earrings with the handkerchief, the frost on the glove, and other little objects that Kitty handles in the course of the novel.] Then suddenly she pushed him away. 'Oh, this is awful, I am dying, go away,' she shrieked. . . .
"Lyovin clutched at his head and ran out of the room.
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" 'It's all right, everything is all right,' Dolly called after him. [She had gone through it seven times herself.]
' 'But,' thought Lyovin, 'they might say what they liked.' He knew now that all was over. He stood in the next room, his head leaning against the door-post, and heard someone emitting shrieks, howls, such as he had never heard before and he knew that this howling thing had been Kitty. But now he had long ago ceased to wish for the child, by now he loathed this child.
He did not even wish for her life now. All he longed for was the end of this awful anguish.
" 'Doctor, what is it, what is it? Good Lord!' he said, snatching at the doctor's arm as the latter came out.
" 'Well,' said the doctor, 'it's the end,' and the doctor's face was so grave as he said it that Lyovin took the end as meaning her death. " [Of course, what the doctor meant was: it will be over in a minute now.]
Now comes the part that stresses the beauty of this natural phenomenon. Mark incidentally that the whole history of literary fiction as an evolutionary process may be said to be a gradual probing of deeper and deeper layers of life. It is quite impossible to imagine either Homer in the ninth century b.c. or Cervantes in the seventeenth century of our era—it is quite impossible to imagine them describing in such wonderful detail childbirth. The question is not whether certain events or emotions are or are not suitable ethically or esthetically. The point I want to make is that the artist, like the scientist, in the process of evolution of art and science, is always casting around, understanding a little more than his predecessor, penetrating further with a keener and more brilliant eye—and this is the artistic result.
"Beside himself he hurried to the bedroom. The first thing he saw was the face of the midwife. It was even more frowning and stern. Kitty's face was not there. In the place where it had been was something that was fearful in its strained distortion and in the sounds that came from it. [Now comes the beauty of the thing.] He fell down with his head on the wooden framework of the bed, feeling that his heart was bursting. The awful scream never paused, it became still more awful, and as though it had reached the utmost limit of terror, suddenly it ceased. Lyovin could not believe his ears, but there could be no doubt; the scream had ceased and he heard a subdued stir and bustle, and hurried breathing, and her voice, gasping, alive, tender, and blissful, uttered softly, 'It's over!'
"He lifted his head. Exhausted, with her hands lying on the quilt, most lovely and serene, she looked at him in silence and tried to smile, and could not.