`Don't I know that the stars don't move?' he asked himself, gazing at the bright planet which had shifted its position up to the topmost twig of a birch tree. `But looking at the movements of the stars, I can't picture to myself the rotation of the earth, and I'm right in saying that the stars move.
`And could the astronomers have understood and calculated anything, if they had taken into account all the complicated and varied motions of the earth? - All the marvelous conclusions they have reached about the distances, weights, revolutions, and perturbations of the heavenly bodies, are only founded on the apparent motions of the heavenly bodies round the stationary earth, on that very motion I see before me now, which has been so for millions of men during long ages - has been and always will be alike, and can always be verified. And just as the conclusions of the astronomers would have been vain and uncertain if not founded on observations of the visible heavens, in relation to a single meridian and a single horizon, so would my conclusions be vain and uncertain if not founded on that conception of right, which has been and will always be alike for all men, which has been revealed to me by Christianity, and which can always be verified in my soul. The question of other religions and their relations to Divinity I have no right to decide, and no possibility of deciding.'
`Oh, you haven't gone in then?' he heard Kitty's voice suddenly, as she came by the same way to the drawing room. `What is it? You're not worried about anything?' she said, looking intently at his face in the starlight.
But she could not have seen his face if a flash of lightning had not hidden the stars and revealed it. In that flash she saw his face distinctly, and seeing him calm and happy, she smiled at him.
`She understands,' he thought; `she knows what I'm thinking about.
Shall I tell her or not? Yes, I'll tell her.' But at the moment he was about to speak, she began speaking.
`Kostia! Do something for me,' she said; `go into the corner room and see if they've made it all ready for Sergei Ivanovich. I can't very well. See if they've put the new washstand in it.'
`Very well, I'll go directly,' said Levin, standing up and kissing her.
`No, I'd better not speak of it,' he thought, when she had gone in before him. `It is a secret for me alone, of vital importance for me, and not to be put into words.
`This new feeling has not changed me, has not made me happy and enlightened all of a sudden, as I had dreamed, just like the feeling for my child. There was no surprise in this either. Whether it is faith or not - I don't know what it is - but this feeling has come just as imperceptibly through suffering, and has taken firm root in my soul.
`I shall go on in the same way, losing my temper with Ivan the coachman, falling into angry discussions, expressing my opinions tactlessly;there will be still the same wall between the holy of holies of my soul and other people, even my wife; I shall still go on scolding her for my own fright and being remorseful for it; I shall still be as unable to understand with my reason why I pray, and I shall still go on praying; but my life now, my whole life apart from anything that can happen to me, every minute of it is no more meaningless, as it was before, but it has the positive meaning of goodness, which I have the power to put into it.'
THE END [Table of Contents]
