Short Fiction, Leo Tolstoy [general ebook reader .txt] 📗

thought. One light spot was there at the back, at the beginning of life, and then it kept getting blacker and blacker, and going faster and faster. “In inverse ratio to the square of the distance from death,” thought Ivan Ilyitch. And the image of a stone falling downwards with increasing velocity sank into his soul. Life, a series of increasing sufferings, falls more and more swiftly to the end, the most fearful sufferings. “I am falling.” He shuddered, shifted himself, would have resisted, but he knew beforehand that he could not resist; and again, with eyes weary with gazing at it, but unable not to gaze at what was before him, he stared at the back of the sofa and waited, waited expecting that fearful fall and shock and dissolution. “Resistance is impossible,” he said to himself. “But if one could at least comprehend what it’s for? Even that’s impossible. It could be explained if one were to say that I hadn’t lived as I ought. But that can’t be alleged,” he said to himself, thinking of all the regularity, correctness, and propriety of his life. “That really can’t be admitted,” he said to himself, his lips smiling ironically as though someone could see his smile and be deceived by it. “No explanation! Agony, death.⁠ ⁠… What for?” XI

So passed a fortnight. During that fortnight an event occurred that had been desired by Ivan Ilyitch and his wife. Petrishtchev made a formal proposal. This took place in the evening. Next day Praskovya Fyodorovna went in to her husband, revolving in her mind how to inform him of Fyodor Dmitryevitch’s proposal, but that night there had been a change for the worse in Ivan Ilyitch. Praskovya Fyodorovna found him on the same sofa, but in a different position. He was lying on his face, groaning, and staring straight before him with a fixed gaze.

She began talking of remedies. He turned his stare on her. She did not finish what she had begun saying; such hatred of her in particular was expressed in that stare.

“For Christ’s sake, let me die in peace,” he said.

She would have gone away, but at that moment the daughter came in and went up to say good morning to him. He looked at his daughter just as at his wife, and to her inquiries how he was, he told her drily that they would soon all be rid of him. Both were silent, sat a little while, and went out.

“How are we to blame?” said Liza to her mother. “As though we had done it! I’m sorry for papa, but why punish us?”

At the usual hour the doctor came. Ivan Ilyitch answered, “Yes, no,” never taking his exasperated stare from him, and towards the end he said, “Why, you know that you can do nothing, so let me be.”

“We can relieve your suffering,” said the doctor.

“Even that you can’t do; let me be.”

The doctor went into the drawing-room and told Praskovya Fyodorovna that it was very serious, and that the only resource left them was opium to relieve his sufferings, which must be terrible. The doctor said his physical sufferings were terrible, and that was true; but even more terrible than his physical sufferings were his mental sufferings, and in that lay his chief misery.

His moral sufferings were due to the fact that during that night, as he looked at the sleepy, good-natured, broad-cheeked face of Gerasim, the thought had suddenly come into his head, “What if in reality all my life, my conscious life, has been not the right thing?” The thought struck him that what he had regarded before as an utter impossibility, that he had spent his life not as he ought, might be the truth. It struck him that those scarcely detected impulses of struggle within him against what was considered good by persons of higher position, scarcely detected impulses which he had dismissed, that they might be the real thing, and everything else might be not the right thing. And his official work, and his ordering of his daily life and of his family, and these social and official interests⁠—all that might be not the right thing. He tried to defend it all to himself. And suddenly he felt all the weakness of what he was defending. And it was useless to defend it.

“But if it’s so,” he said to himself, “and I am leaving life with the consciousness that I have lost all that was given me, and there’s no correcting it, then what?” He lay on his back and began going over his whole life entirely anew. When he saw the footman in the morning, then his wife, then his daughter, then the doctor, every movement they made, every word they uttered, confirmed for him the terrible truth that had been revealed to him in the night. In them he saw himself, saw all in which he had lived, and saw distinctly that it was all not the right thing; it was a horrible, vast deception that concealed both life and death. This consciousness intensified his physical agonies, multiplied them tenfold. He groaned and tossed from side to side and pulled at the covering over him. It seemed to him that it was stifling him and weighing him down. And for that he hated them.

They gave him a big dose of opium; he sank into unconsciousness; but at dinnertime the same thing began again. He drove them all away, and tossed from side to side.

His wife came to him and said, “Jean, darling, do this for my sake” (for my sake?). “It can’t do harm, and it often does good. Why, it’s nothing. And often in health people⁠—”

He opened his eyes wide.

“What? Take the sacrament? What for? No. Besides⁠ ⁠…”

She began to cry.

“Yes, my dear? I’ll send for our priest, he’s so nice.”

“All right, very well,” he said.

When the priest came and confessed him he was softened, felt as it were a relief from his doubts, and consequently