Page:Complete Works of Count Tolstoy - 18.djvu/422

 Vásya. 'My Vásya! He will see the musician kiss his mother. What will take place in his poor soul? What does she care! She loves—' And again the same storm arose in me. 'No, no. I will think of the inspection of the hospital. Yes, how the patient yesterday complained of the doctor. The doctor has a moustache just like Trukhachévski's. With what a brazen face he—both of them—deceived me, when he said that he was leaving.' And again it began. Everything of which I thought was connected with him. I suffered terribly. My chief suffering was in the ignorance, the doubts, the doubleness, the want of knowledge of whether I was to love or hate her. The suffering was a strange feeling: a hatred of the consciousness of my humiliation and his victory, and a terrible hatred for her.

"'I cannot make an end of myself and leave her; she must suffer at least some, in order that she may understand what I have gone through,' I said to myself. I went out at every station to divert myself. In one station I saw people drinking near the counter, and I immediately drank some brandy. Near me was standing a Jew, and he also was drinking. He began to talk, and I, not to be left alone in the car, went with him into a dirty, smoke-filled car of the third class, the floor of which was covered with shells of pumpkin seeds. I sat down at his side, and he kept chatting and telling some kinds of anecdotes. I listened to him, but was unable to understand what he was saying because I was all the time thinking about myself. He noticed it and began to demand my attention; so I got up and went back to my car.

"'I must consider,' I said to myself, 'whether that which I am thinking is true, and whether there is any cause for me to be tormented so.' I sat down, wishing quietly to reflect over it, but immediately, instead of the quiet reflection, it started again: instead of meditation there were pictures and presentations. 'How often have