Page:Complete Works of Count Tolstoy - 18.djvu/61

 "If I were to die like Caius, I should know it, and an inner voice would tell me so, but nothing similar has been the case with me, and I and all my friends understood that it is not all the same as with Caius. But now it is like this!" he said to himself. "It is impossible! It cannot be, but it is so. How is this? How is this to be comprehended?"

And he was unable to understand, and tried to dispel this thought as being false, irregular, and morbid, and to substitute for it other, regular, healthy thoughts. But this thought,—not merely thought, but, as it were, reality,—came back and stood before him.

And he invoked in the place of this thought other thoughts in rotation, in the hope of finding a support in them. He tried to return to former trains of thought, which heretofore had veiled the thought of death from him. But, strange to say, what formerly had veiled, concealed, and destroyed the consciousness of death, now could no longer produce this effect. Of late Iván Ilích passed the greater part of his time in these endeavours to reëstablish his former trains of feeling, which had veiled death from him.

He said to himself, "I will busy myself with my service, for have I not lived by it heretofore?" and he went to court, dispelling all doubts from himself; he entered into conversations with his associates, and seated himself in his customary manner, casting a distracted, pensive glance upon the crowd, and leaning with both his emaciated hands on the rests of the oak chair, leaning over to an associate, as on former occasions, moving up the case, and whispering, and then, suddenly casting an upward glance and seating himself straight, he pronounced the customary words and began the case. But suddenly, in the middle, the pain in his side, paying no attention to the period of the development of the case, began its own gnawing work. Iván Ilích listened to it and dispelled