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Chapter 3 |
A crowd of people, principally women, was thronging round the church lighted up for the wedding. |
Those who had not succeeded in getting into the main entrance were crowding about the windows, pushing, wrangling, and peeping through the gratings. |
More than twenty carriages had already been drawn up in ranks along the street by the police. |
A police officer, regardless of the frost, stood at the entrance, gorgeous in his uniform. |
More carriages were continually driving up, and ladies wearing flowers and carrying their trains, and men taking off their helmets or black hats kept walking into the church. |
Inside the church both lusters were already lighted, and all the candles before the holy pictures. |
The gilt on the red ground of the holy picture-stand, and the gilt relief on the pictures, and the silver of the lusters and candlesticks, and the stones of the floor, and the rugs, and the banners above in the choir, and the steps of the altar, and the old blackened books, and the cassocks and surplices—all were flooded with light. |
On the right side of the warm church, in the crowd of frock coats and white ties, uniforms and broadcloth, velvet, satin, hair and flowers, bare shoulders and arms and long gloves, there was discreet but lively conversation that echoed strangely in the high cupola. |
Every time there was heard the creak of the opened door the conversation in the crowd died away, and everybody looked round expecting to see the bride and bridegroom come in. |
But the door had opened more than ten times, and each time it was either a belated guest or guests, who joined the circle of the invited on the right, or a spectator, who had eluded or softened the police officer, and went to join the crowd of outsiders on the left. |
Both the guests and the outside public had by now passed through all the phases of anticipation. |
At first they imagined that the bride and bridegroom would arrive immediately, and attached no importance at all to their being late. |
Then they began to look more and more often towards the door, and to talk of whether anything could have happened. |
Then the long delay began to be positively discomforting, and relations and guests tried to look as if they were not thinking of the bridegroom but were engrossed in conversation. |
The head deacon, as though to remind them of the value of his time, coughed impatiently, making the window-panes quiver in their frames. |
In the choir the bored choristers could be heard trying their voices and blowing their noses. |
The priest was continually sending first the beadle and then the deacon to find out whether the bridegroom had not come, more and more often he went himself, in a lilac vestment and an embroidered sash, to the side door, expecting to see the bridegroom. |
At last one of the ladies, glancing at her watch, said, “It really is strange, though!” |
and all the guests became uneasy and began loudly expressing their wonder and dissatisfaction. |
One of the bridegroom’s best men went to find out what had happened. |
Kitty meanwhile had long ago been quite ready, and in her white dress and long veil and wreath of orange blossoms she was standing in the drawing-room of the Shtcherbatskys’ house with her sister, Madame Lvova, who was her bridal-mother. She was looking out of the window, and had been for over half an hour anxiously expecting to hear from the best man that her bridegroom was at the church. |
Levin meanwhile, in his trousers, but without his coat and waistcoat, was walking to and fro in his room at the hotel, continually putting his head out of the door and looking up and down the corridor. |
But in the corridor there was no sign of the person he was looking for and he came back in despair, and frantically waving his hands addressed Stepan Arkadyevitch, who was smoking serenely. |
“Was ever a man in such a fearful fool’s position?” |
he said. |
“Yes, it is stupid,” Stepan Arkadyevitch assented, smiling soothingly. |
“But don’t worry, it’ll be brought directly.” |
“No, what is to be done!” |
said Levin, with smothered fury. |
“And these fools of open waistcoats! |
Out of the question!” |
he said, looking at the crumpled front of his shirt. |
“And what if the things have been taken on to the railway station!” |
he roared in desperation. |
“Then you must put on mine.” |
“I ought to have done so long ago, if at all.” |
“It’s not nice to look ridiculous.... |
Wait a bit! |
it will come round .” |
The point was that when Levin asked for his evening suit, Kouzma, his old servant, had brought him the coat, waistcoat, and everything that was wanted. |
“But the shirt!” |
cried Levin. |
“You’ve got a shirt on,” Kouzma answered, with a placid smile. |
Kouzma had not thought of leaving out a clean shirt, and on receiving instructions to pack up everything and send it round to the Shtcherbatskys’ house, from which the young people were to set out the same evening, he had done so, packing everything but the dress suit. |
The shirt worn since the morning was crumpled and out of the question with the fashionable open waistcoat. |
It was a long way to send to the Shtcherbatskys’. |
They sent out to buy a shirt. |
The servant came back; everything was shut up—it was Sunday. |
They sent to Stepan Arkadyevitch’s and brought a shirt—it was impossibly wide and short. |
They sent finally to the Shtcherbatskys’ to unpack the things. |
The bridegroom was expected at the church while he was pacing up and down his room like a wild beast in a cage, peeping out into the corridor, and with horror and despair recalling what absurd things he had said to Kitty and what she might be thinking now. |
At last the guilty Kouzma flew panting into the room with the shirt. |
“Only just in time. |
They were just lifting it into the van,” said Kouzma. |
Three minutes later Levin ran full speed into the corridor, not looking at his watch for fear of aggravating his sufferings. |
“You won’t help matters like this,” said Stepan Arkadyevitch with a smile, hurrying with more deliberation after him. |
“It will come round, it will come round ... |
I tell you.” |
Looking down at her he saw her face in profile, and from the scarcely perceptible quiver of her lips and eyelashes he knew she was aware of his eyes upon her. |
She did not look round, but the high scalloped collar, that reached her little pink ear, trembled faintly. |
He saw that a sigh was held back in her throat, and the little hand in the long glove shook as it held the candle. |
All the fuss of the shirt, of being late, all the talk of friends and relations, their annoyance, his ludicrous position—all suddenly passed away and he was filled with joy and dread. |
The handsome, stately head-deacon wearing a silver robe and his curly locks standing out at each side of his head, stepped smartly forward, and lifting his stole on two fingers, stood opposite the priest. |
“Blessed be the name of the Lord,” the solemn syllables rang out slowly one after another, setting the air quivering with waves of sound. |
“Blessed is the name of our God, from the beginning, is now, and ever shall be,” the little old priest answered in a submissive, piping voice, still fingering something at the lectern. |
And the full chorus of the unseen choir rose up, filling the whole church, from the windows to the vaulted roof, with broad waves of melody. It grew stronger, rested for an instant, and slowly died away. |
They prayed, as they always do, for peace from on high and for salvation, for the Holy Synod, and for the Tsar; they prayed, too, for the servants of God, Konstantin and Ekaterina, now plighting their troth. |
“Vouchsafe to them love made perfect, peace and help, O Lord, we beseech Thee,” the whole church seemed to breathe with the voice of the head deacon. |
Levin heard the words, and they impressed him. |
“How did they guess that it is help, just help that one wants?” |
he thought, recalling all his fears and doubts of late. |
“What do I know? |
what can I do in this fearful business,” he thought, “without help? |
Yes, it is help I want now.” |
When the deacon had finished the prayer for the Imperial family, the priest turned to the bridal pair with a book: “Eternal God, that joinest together in love them that were separate,” he read in a gentle, piping voice: “who hast ordained the union of holy wedlock that cannot be set asunder, Thou who didst bless Isaac and Rebecca and their descendants, according to Thy Holy Covenant; bless Thy servants, Konstantin and Ekaterina, leading them in the path of all good works. |
For gracious and merciful art Thou, our Lord, and glory be to Thee, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost, now and ever shall be.” |
“Amen!” the unseen choir sent rolling again upon the air. |
“‘Joinest together in love them that were separate.’ What deep meaning in those words, and how they correspond with what one feels at this moment,” thought Levin. |
“Is she feeling the same as I?” |
And looking round, he met her eyes, and from their expression he concluded that she was understanding it just as he was. |
But this was a mistake; she almost completely missed the meaning of the words of the service; she had not heard them, in fact. |
She could not listen to them and take them in, so strong was the one feeling that filled her breast and grew stronger and stronger. |
That feeling was joy at the completion of the process that for the last month and a half had been going on in her soul, and had during those six weeks been a joy and a torture to her. |
On the day when in the drawing-room of the house in Arbaty Street she had gone up to him in her brown dress, and given herself to him without a word—on that day, at that hour, there took place in her heart a complete severance from all her old life, and a quite different, new, utterly strange life had begun for her, while the old life was actually going on as before. |
Those six weeks had for her been a time of the utmost bliss and the utmost misery. |
All her life, all her desires and hopes were concentrated on this one man, still uncomprehended by her, to whom she was bound by a feeling of alternate attraction and repulsion, even less comprehended than the man himself, and all the while she was going on living in the outward conditions of her old life. |
Living the old life, she was horrified at herself, at her utter insurmountable callousness to all her own past, to things, to habits, to the people she had loved, who loved her—to her mother, who was wounded by her indifference, to her kind, tender father, till then dearer than all the world. |
At one moment she was horrified at this indifference, at another she rejoiced at what had brought her to this indifference. |
She could not frame a thought, not a wish apart from life with this man; but this new life was not yet, and she could not even picture it clearly to herself. |
There was only anticipation, the dread and joy of the new and the unknown. |
And now behold—anticipation and uncertainty and remorse at the abandonment of the old life—all was ending, and the new was beginning. |
This new life could not but have terrors for her inexperience; but, terrible or not, the change had been wrought six weeks before in her soul, and this was merely the final sanction of what had long been completed in her heart. |
Turning again to the lectern, the priest with some difficulty took Kitty’s little ring, and asking Levin for his hand, put it on the first joint of his finger. |
“The servant of God, Konstantin, plights his troth to the servant of God, Ekaterina.” |
And putting his big ring on Kitty’s touchingly weak, pink little finger, the priest said the same thing. |
And the bridal pair tried several times to understand what they had to do, and each time made some mistake and were corrected by the priest in a whisper. |
At last, having duly performed the ceremony, having signed the rings with the cross, the priest handed Kitty the big ring, and Levin the little one. Again they were puzzled, and passed the rings from hand to hand, still without doing what was expected. |
Dolly, Tchirikov, and Stepan Arkadyevitch stepped forward to set them right. |
There was an interval of hesitation, whispering, and smiles; but the expression of solemn emotion on the faces of the betrothed pair did not change: on the contrary, in their perplexity over their hands they looked more grave and deeply moved than before, and the smile with which Stepan Arkadyevitch whispered to them that now they would each put on their own ring died away on his lips. |
He had a feeling that any smile would jar on them. “Thou who didst from the beginning create male and female,” the priest read after the exchange of rings, “from Thee woman was given to man to be a helpmeet to him, and for the procreation of children. |
O Lord, our God, who hast poured down the blessings of Thy Truth according to Thy Holy Covenant upon Thy chosen servants, our fathers, from generation to generation, bless Thy servants Konstantin and Ekaterina, and make their troth fast in faith, and union of hearts, and truth, and love....” |
Levin felt more and more that all his ideas of marriage, all his dreams of how he would order his life, were mere childishness, and that it was something he had not understood hitherto, and now understood less than ever, though it was being performed upon him. The lump in his throat rose higher and higher, tears that would not be checked came into his eyes. |
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