Chapter 9
THE DOCTOR WAS NOT yet up, and the footman said that he had been up late, and had given orders not to be waked, but would get up soon. The footman was cleaning the lamp-chimneys, and making a proper mess of the job.
Levin waited impatiently in the street for the doctor, and finally decided that he could wait no longer, and would burst in on the man and wake him if he had to. He stormed back toward the doctor’s door—but was stopped by a fat little man in a tattered lab coat, who appeared in the shadows holding a small silver box. This man was not Federov, but looked much like him: the same tangled beard, the same beady eyes, the tattered lab coat.
“Rearguard,” the man said gravely.
“Action,” Levin responded immediately.
The man stepped fully from the shadows. “Konstantin Dmitrich, my name is Dmitriev.”
“I cannot speak to you now! I have urgent business this night!”
“Not so urgent as this,” the agent of UnConSciya replied. “Levin, the time has come.”
“No,” Levin protested, his voice rising. “It cannot be tonight!” Levin moved to push past him, and the man who called himself Dmitriev scowled and pressed the button on his little box. Levin yelped in pain as he banged against some sort of radiating, semi-invisible bars, and a small electric shock quivered through his system.
“I am sorry,” said Dmitriev, scratching at his tangled beard. “But I require your complete attention.
His eyes wide with rage, Levin stared at the squat man in his shabby coat. “Why do you encage me? I am with you! And I swear to you that tomorrow I shall offer whatever aid I can. Only you must find me tomorrow.”
“We do not have the luxury of waiting for tomorrow. We have a chance to stop the furnaces, tonight, to halt the melting down of the Class Ills. But we require a man trusted in society, a man beyond suspicion, and we need him tonight.”
“Then you must find another man!” Levin threw himself at the invisible enclosure, and a ripple of fiery pain exploded across his chest.
“Stop it—stop that,” cried Dmitriev. “You will kill yourself.”
“You must free me!” Levin shouted, half mad with his need to fetch the doctor and return to Kitty’s side. He hurled his shoulder once more against the invisible bars that held him, and was thrown down onto the street writhing and clutching at himself.
“No . . . no . . . I beg of you to stop,” said Dmitriev with desperation, as Levin stumbled back to his feet.
“Let me free! Ahhh!”
He lunged again, and this time felt the shock in every synapse of his body, jolting up and down his spinal column, pooling at the base of his brain. Levin collapsed on the street, twitching and muttering like a madman. Dmitriev looked nervously around. “You cannot persist in this. Rearguard,” he insisted again. “Rearguard!”
“Kitty.”
Levin groaned, crawled to his feet. On all fours he limped into the barely perceptible bars like a wounded animal, shuddered with pain, and collapsed feebly in the street.
“I cannot let you die, Konstantin Levin,” the man from UnConSciya said at last. “You have a more important part to play. I cannot let you die.” He clicked the button on the box, and with a barely audible whoosh Levin’s invisible prison disappeared. He staggered toward the door of the doctor’s home.
“Only . . . only think of your country,” said the operative to Levin’s back, now pleading when only a moment ago he had been commanding.
Levin lifted his hand to pull on the makeshift bellpull that the doctor’s household had rigged in place of a Class I Doorchime.
“Konstantin Dmitritch! Do it for your Class III.”
Levin turned, and hissed, “What of him?”
“I am sorry to tell you this, but Socrates and Tatiana have been captured in Urgensky caught up in a mass purge of Class II robots. They are on the way here, even now, to be melted down with the others. Unless we can stop it . . . and we can stop it. You can.”
Levin, feverish with pain and the desperate need to return to his wife, shook his head rapidly, like a mad dog shakes off a plaguing flea, and rang the bell of the doctor’s house.
* * *
When Levin got home with the doctor, he had nearly pushed the encounter from his mind. He drove up at the same time as the princess, Kitty’s mother, and they went up to the bedroom door together. The princess had tears in her eyes, and her hands were shaking. Seeing Levin, she embraced him, and burst into tears.
From the moment when he had woken and understood what was going on, Levin had prepared his mind to bear resolutely what was before him, and without considering or anticipating anything, to avoid upsetting his wife, and on the contrary to soothe her and keep up her courage. Without allowing himself even to think of what was to come, of how it would end, judging from his inquiries as to the usual duration of these ordeals, Levin had in his imagination braced himself to bear up and to keep a tight rein on his feelings for five hours, and it had seemed to him he could do this. But when he came back from the doctor’s and saw her sufferings again, he fell to repeating more and more frequently: “Lord, have mercy on us, and succor us!” He sighed, and flung his head up, and began to feel afraid he could not bear it, that he would burst into tears or run away. Such agony it was to him. And only one hour had passed.
He thought at one moment during this unbearable hour of Socrates. There would be time, he told himself. There would be time to help him, to save him. Tomorrow . . . And his mind then passed over these thoughts, returning to what was before him: to Kitty, and to his child, teetering on the cusp of existence.
This was a time for humans.
After that hour there passed another hour, two hours, three, the full five hours he had fixed as the furthest limit of his sufferings, and the position was still unchanged; and he was still bearing it because there was nothing to be done but bear it; every instant feeling that he had reached the utmost limits of his endurance, and that his heart would break with sympathy and pain.
But still the minutes passed by and the hours, and still hours more, and his misery and horror grew and were more and more intense.
All the ordinary conditions of life, without which one can form no conception of anything, had ceased to exist for Levin. He lost all sense of time. Minutes—those minutes when she sent for him and he held her moist hand, which would squeeze his hand with extraordinary violence and then push it away—seemed to him hours, and hours seemed to him minutes. Where he was all this time, he knew as little as the time of anything. He saw her swollen face, sometimes bewildered and in agony, sometimes smiling and trying to reassure him. He saw the old princess too, flushed and overwrought, with her gray curls in disorder, forcing herself to gulp down her tears, biting her lips; he saw Dolly too and the doctor, smoking fat cigarettes, rifling through some old medical manual, its pages yellowed from generations of disuse; and the old prince walking up and down the hall with a frowning face. But why they came in and went out, where they were, he did not know.
All he knew and felt was that what was happening was what had happened nearly a year before in the hotel of the country town when the alien terror had burst from Nikolai’s chest. But that had been grief—grief and terror—this was joy. Yet that grief and this joy were alike outside all the ordinary conditions of life; they were loopholes, as it were, in that ordinary life through which there came glimpses of something sublime. And in the contemplation of this sublime something the soul was exalted to inconceivable heights of which it had before had no conception, while reason lagged behind, unable to keep up with it.
He did not know whether it was late or early. The candles had all burned out. Dolly had just been in the study and had suggested to the doctor that he should lie down. There had been a period of repose, and he had sunk into oblivion. He had completely forgotten what was going on now. He heard the doctor’s chatter and understood it. Suddenly there came an unearthly shriek. The shriek was so awful that Levin did not even jump up, but holding his breath, gazed in terrified inquiry at the doctor. The doctor put his head to one side, listened, and smiled approvingly. Everything was so extraordinary that nothing could strike Levin as strange. I suppose it must be so, he thought, and still sat where he was. Whose scream was this? He jumped up, ran on tiptoe to the bedroom, and took up his position at Kitty’s pillow. The scream had subsided, but there was some change now. What it was he did not see and did not comprehend, and he had no wish to see or comprehend. Kitty’s swollen and agonized face, a tress of hair clinging to her moist brow, was turned to him and sought his eyes. Her lifted hands asked for his hands. Clutching his chill hands in her moist ones, she began squeezing them to her face.
“Don’t go, don’t go! I’m not afraid, I’m not afraid!” she said rapidly. “Mamma, take my earrings. They bother me. You’re not afraid?”
She spoke quickly, very quickly, and tried to smile. But suddenly her face was drawn, she pushed him away.
“Oh, this is awful! I’m dying, I’m dying! Go away!” she shrieked, and again he heard that unearthly scream.
Levin clutched at his head and ran out of the room.
“It’s nothing, it’s nothing, it’s all right,” Dolly called after him.
But they might say what they liked, he knew now that all was over. He stood in the next room, his head leaning against the doorpost, and heard shrieks, howls such as he had never heard before, and he knew that what had been Kitty was uttering these shrieks. 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? By God!” he said, snatching at the doctor’s hand as he came up.
“It’s the end,” said the doctor. And the doctor’s face was so grave as he said it that Levin took “the end” as meaning her death.
Beside himself, he ran into the bedroom. 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. Levin 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, uttering softly, “It’s over!”
He lifted his head. With her hands hanging exhausted on the quilt, looking extraordinarily lovely and serene, she looked at him in silence and tried to smile, and could not.
And suddenly, from the mysterious and awful faraway world in which he had been living for the last twenty-two hours, Levin felt himself all in an instant borne back to the everyday world, the New Russia he had set himself in opposition to, glorified though now by such a radiance of happiness that he could not bear it. The strained cords snapped; sobs and tears of joy, which he had never foreseen, rose up with such violence that his whole body shook, that for long they prevented him from speaking.
Falling on his knees before the bed, he held his wife’s hand before his lips and kissed it, and the hand, with a weak movement of the fingers, responded to his kiss. And meanwhile, there at the foot of the bed, in the deft hands of the old princess, like a flickering display light, lay the life of a human creature, which had never existed before, and which would now with the same right, with the same importance to itself, live and create in its own image.
“Alive! Alive! And a boy, too! Set your mind at rest!” Levin heard the princess saying, as she slapped the baby’s back with a shaking hand.
“Mamma, is it true?” said Kitty’s voice.
The princess’s sobs were all the answers she could make. And in the midst of the silence there came, in unmistakable reply to the mother’s question, a voice quite unlike the subdued voices speaking in the room. It was the bold, clamorous, self-assertive squall of the new human being, who had so incomprehensibly appeared.
Levin was unutterably happy, that he understood. But the baby? Whence, why, who was he? . . . He could not get used to the idea. It seemed to him something extraneous, superfluous, to which he could not accustom himself.
“Look now,” said Kitty, turning the baby so that he could see it.
All the high ideals, the Golden Hope he had vowed to fight for, were nowhere in his mind as he laid eyes for the first time upon his child. When the boy was yet unborn, he could tell himself that protecting the future of the child meant engaging in furtive rebellion, dedicating himself to an inchoate struggle to recast society, no matter the cost.
But now that he was here, was real, now that this fragile being lay bawling in his arms, all that mattered was holding him close, tending to the child’s needs and to the needs of his brave, beloved wife. The child was all, the family was all.
The aged-looking little face suddenly puckered up still more and the baby sneezed.