Nicholas listened but evidently was not interested.
These two men were so near akin and so intimate with one another, that between them the least movement or intonation expressed more than could be said in words.
At present the same thought filled both their minds and dominated all else: Nicholas’s illness and approaching death. But neither of them dared speak of it, and not having expressed the one thing that occupied their thoughts, whatever they said rang false. Never before had Levin felt so glad when an evening was over and it was time to go to bed. Never had he been so unnatural and artificial, even with an outsider or when making a formal call, as he was that day. And his consciousness of this artificiality and his repentance made him more unnatural. He wished to weep over his dear, dying brother, but had to listen and keep up a conversation about how Nicholas was going to live.
The house being damp, and only his bedroom heated, Levin put his brother to sleep behind a partition in that room.
Nicholas went to bed but, whether he slept or not, kept tossing and coughing like a sick man and, when unable to clear his throat, muttering some complaint. Sometimes he sighed deeply and said, ‘Oh, my God!’ Sometimes, when the phlegm choked him, he muttered angrily, ‘Oh, the devil!’ Levin long lay awake listening to him. His thoughts were very various, but they all led up to death.
Death, the inevitable end of everything, confronted him for the first time with irresistible force. And that Death which was present in this dear brother (who, waking up, moaned and by habit called indiscriminately on God and on the devil) was not so far away as it had hitherto seemed to be. It was within himself too — he felt it. If not to-day, then to-morrow or thirty years hence, was it not all the same? But what that inevitable Death was, he not only did not know, not only had never considered, but could not and dared not consider.
‘I am working, I want to do something, and I had forgotten that it will all end in Death!’
He sat on his bed in the dark, doubled his arms round his knees and thought, scarcely breathing from the mental strain. But the more mental effort he made the clearer he saw that it was undoubtedly so: that he had really forgotten and overlooked one little circumstance in life — that Death would come and end everything, so that it was useless to begin anything, and that there was no help for it. Yes, it was terrible, but true.
‘But I am still alive: what am I to do now? What am I to do?’ he said despairingly. He lit a candle, got up carefully, went to the looking-glass, and began examining his face and hair. Yes! There were grey hairs on his temples. He opened his mouth: his double teeth were beginning to decay. He bared his muscular arms. Yes, he was very strong. But Nicholas, who was breathing there with the remains of his lungs, had once had a healthy body too; and he suddenly remembered how as children they used to go to bed together and only waited till Theodore Bogdanich had left the room, to throw pillows at one another and to laugh and laugh so irrepressibly that even the fear of Theodore Bogdanich could not stop that overflowing bubbling consciousness of the joy of living. ‘And now that sunk and hollow chest… . And I, who do not know what will happen to me, or why …’
‘Kha, kha! Oh, the devil! What are you fidgeting for? Why don’t you sleep?’ his brother’s voice called to him.
‘Oh, I don’t know, just sleeplessness.’
‘And I have slept well; I don’t perspire now. See, feel my shirt, it’s not damp!’
Levin felt it, returned behind the partition, and put out the candle, but was long unable to sleep. Just when the question of how to live had become a little clearer to him, a new insoluble problem presented itself — Death.
‘Well, he is dying, he will die before spring. How can he be helped. What can I say to him? What do I know about it? I had forgotten there was such a thing!’
Chapter 32
LEVIN had long ago noticed that after people have made one uncomfortable by their pliancy and submissiveness they soon become unbearably exacting and aggressive. He felt that this would happen with his brother. And really Nicholas’s meekness did not last long. The very next morning he grew irritable and cavilled at everything his brother said, touching his most sensitive spots.
Levin felt guilty but could do nothing. He felt that if they both spoke without dissimulation and straight from the heart, they would only look into one another’s eyes and Constantine would say nothing but, ‘You will die! You will die!’ and Nicholas would only say in reply: ‘I know I shall die and I am afraid, afraid, afraid!’ That was all they would say if only they spoke straight from the heart. But that would make life impossible; therefore Constantine tried to do what all his life he had tried and never known how to do (although he had often observed that many people were able to do it well), something without which life was impossible: he tried to say something different from what he thought; and he felt all the time that it sounded false and that his brother detected him and grew irritable.
On the third day of his stay Nicholas challenged his brother to explain his plans to him once more, and not only found fault with them but purposely confused them with communism.
‘You have only taken an idea from others, and distorted it, and you wish to apply it where it is inapplicable.’
‘But I tell you that the two things have nothing in common! Communists deny the justice of property, capital, or inheritance, while I do not deny that main stimulus’ (it was repulsive to Levin to find himself using such words, but since he had been engrossed in his work he had involuntarily begun using more and more foreign words), ‘but want only to regulate labour.’
‘That is it. You have taken other people’s idea, dropped all that gave it force, and wish to make one believe that it is something new,’ said Nicholas, angrily jerking his neck.
‘But my idea has nothing in common …’
‘That idea,’ said Nicholas Levin with a sarcastic smile and angrily glistening eyes, ‘that idea at any rate, if one may say so, has a geometric charm of definiteness and certainty. It may be utopian; but granting the possibility of making a tabula rasa of the past — and abolishing private property and families — then labour comes by its own. But you have nothing …’
‘Why do you muddle it? I never was a communist.’
‘But I have been, and now I think it is premature but reasonable, and that it has a future as Christianity had in the first centuries.’
‘I only think that the force of labour must be dealt with in a scientifically experimental manner. It must be studied and its characteristics …’
‘But that is quite unnecessary! That force finds its own form of activity in accord with its degree of development. There used to be slaves everywhere, then villeins; and we have labour paid in kind, and leaseholders, and hired labour: so what are you looking for?’
At these words Levin suddenly grew warm, for at the bottom of his heart he felt that it was true — true that he wished to balance between communism and the existing forms of life, and that this was hardly possible.
‘I am seeking for a way of making labour profitable for me and for the labourers,’ he answered hotly. ‘I want to establish …’
‘You do not want to establish anything. You simply want to be original, as you always have done, and to show that you are not just exploiting the peasants, but have ideas!’
‘You think so? Well, then, leave me alone!’ said Levin, and he felt that a muscle was uncontrollably quivering in his left cheek.
‘You have no convictions and never had any; you only want to flatter your self-esteem.’
‘Well,