Now, on the contrary, the feeling of joy and peace was keener than ever, and thought could not keep pace with feeling.
He walked across the terrace and looked at two stars that had come out in the darkening sky, and suddenly he remembered.
"Yes, looking at the sky, I thought that the dome that I see is not a deception, and then I thought something, I shirked facing something," he mused. "But whatever it was, there can be no disproving it!
I have but to think, and all will come clear!"
Just as he was going into the nursery he remembered what it was he had shirked facing.
It was that if the chief proof of the Divinity was His revelation of what is right, how is it this revelation is confined to the Christian church alone?
What relation to this revelation have the beliefs of the Buddhists, Mohammedans, who preached and did good too?
It seemed to him that he had an answer to this question; but he had not time to formulate it to himself before he went into the nursery.
Kitty was standing with her sleeves tucked up over the baby in the bath. Hearing her husband's footstep, she turned towards him, summoning him to her with her smile.
With one hand she was supporting the fat baby that lay floating and sprawling on its back, while with the other she squeezed the sponge over him.
"Come, look, look!" she said, when her husband came up to her. "Agafea Mihalovna's right.
He knows us!"
Mitya had on that day given unmistakable, incontestable signs of recognizing all his friends.
As soon as Levin approached the bath, the experiment was tried, and it was completely successful.
The cook, sent for with this object, bent over the baby.
He frowned and shook his head disapprovingly.
Kitty bent down to him, he gave her a beaming smile, propped his little hands on the sponge and chirruped, making such a queer little contented sound with his lips, that Kitty and the nurse were not alone in their admiration. Levin, too, was surprised and delighted.
The baby was taken out of the bath, drenched with water, wrapped in towels, dried, and after a piercing scream, handed to his mother.
"Well, I am glad you are beginning to love him," said Kitty to her husband, when she had settled herself comfortably in her usual place, with the baby at her breast. "I am so glad!
It had begun to distress me.
You said you had no feeling for him."
"No; did I say that? I only said I was disappointed."
"What! disappointed in him?" "Not disappointed in him, but in my own feeling; I had expected more.
I had expected a rush of new delightful emotion to come as a surprise.
And then instead of that--disgust, pity..."
She listened attentively, looking at him over the baby, while she put back on her slender fingers the rings she had taken off while giving Mitya his bath.
"And most of all, at there being far more apprehension and pity than pleasure.
Today, after that fright during the storm, I understand how I love him."
Kitty's smile was radiant.
"Were you very much frightened?" she said. "So was I too, but I feel it more now that it's over.
I'm going to look at the oak.
How nice Katavasov is!
And what a happy day we've had altogether.
And you're so nice with Sergey Ivanovitch, when you care to be....
Well, go back to them.
It's always so hot and steamy here after the bath."
Chapter 19.
Going out of the nursery and being again alone, Levin went back at once to the thought, in which there was something not clear.
Instead of going into the drawing room, where he heard voices, he stopped on the terrace, and leaning his elbows on the parapet, he gazed up at the sky.
It was quite dark now, and in the south, where he was looking, there were no clouds.
The storm had drifted on to the opposite side of the sky, and there were flashes of lightning and distant thunder from that quarter.
Levin listened to the monotonous drip from the lime trees in the garden, and looked at the triangle of stars he knew so well, and the Milky Way with its branches that ran through its midst.
At each flash of lightning the Milky Way, and even the bright stars, vanished, but as soon as the lightning died away, they reappeared in their places as though some hand had flung them back with careful aim.
"Well, what is it perplexes me?" Levin said to himself, feeling beforehand that the solution of his difficulties was ready in his soul, though he did not know it yet.
"Yes, the one unmistakable, incontestable manifestation of the Divinity is the law of right and wrong, which has come into the world by revelation, and which I feel in myself, and in the recognition of which--I don't make myself, but whether I will or not--I am made one with other men in one body of believers, which is called the church.
Well, but the Jews, the Mohammedans, the Confucians, the Buddhists--what of them?" he put to himself the question he had feared to face.
"Can these hundreds of millions of men be deprived of that highest blessing without which life has no meaning?" He pondered a moment, but immediately corrected himself. "But what am I questioning?" he said to himself. "I am questioning the relation to Divinity of all the different religions of all mankind.
I am questioning the universal manifestation of God to all the world with all those misty blurs.
What am I about?
To me individually, to my heart has been revealed a knowledge beyond all doubt, and unattainable by reason, and here I am obstinately trying to express that knowledge in reason and words.