Page:Complete Works of Count Tolstoy - 18.djvu/58

 after me; they will come to the same. And they are making merry. Beasts!"

Malice was choking him. He felt painfully and intolerably oppressed. It could not be that all should be fated to experience this terrible fear. He got up.

"Something is not quite right; I must calm myself, I must consider everything from the beginning."

And he began to consider.

"Yes, the beginning of the disease. I struck my side, and I was all the time the same, to-day and to-morrow,—I had a little pain, then more, then the doctors, then a gnawing pain, then despair, again the doctors; and I kept coming nearer and nearer to the abyss. There is less strength. Nearer and nearer. And I wore myself out,—I have no light in my eyes. And there is death, and I am thinking all the time of the blind gut. I am thinking of mending the gut, but this is death. Is it really death?"

Again he was assailed by terror: he breathed heavily, and bent over, trying to find a match, and pressed with his elbow against the foot-rest. The foot-rest was in his way and caused him pain, so he grew angry at it and in his anger pressed harder against it and threw it down. In his despair he lost his breath and threw himself down on his back, expecting death to come at once.

At this time the guests were departing. Praskóvya Fédorovna was seeing them off. She heard something fall, and entered the room.

"What is the matter with you?"

"Nothing. I dropped it accidentally."

She went out and brought a candle. He was lying down, breathing heavily and fast, like a man who had run a verst, and looked at her with an arrested glance.

"What is the matter with you, Jean?"

"Noth—ing. I—dropped—it."

"What is the use of telling her? She will not under-