Page:Complete Works of Count Tolstoy - 18.djvu/68

 and I, too, know that I am dying,—so stop at least your lying." But he had never the courage to do it.

The horrible, terrible act of his dying, he saw, was by all those who surrounded him reduced to the level of an accidental unpleasantness and partly to that of an indecency (something the way they treat a man who, upon entering a drawing-room, spreads a bad odour), through that very "decency" which he had been serving all his life; he saw that no one would pity him, because no one wanted even to understand his position. Gerásim was the only one who understood this position and pitied him. And so Iván Ilích never felt happy except when he was with Gerásim. He felt well when Gerásim, frequently whole nights at a stretch, held his legs and would not go to bed, saying, "Please not to trouble yourself, Iván Ilích, I shall get enough sleep yet;" or when he, passing over to "thou," suddenly added, "If thou wert not a sick man it would be different, but as it is, why should I not serve thee?"

Gerásim was the only one who did not lie; everything proved that he alone understood what the matter was, and did not consider it necessary to conceal it, but simply pitied his emaciated, feeble master. Once, when Iván Ilích sent him away, he went so far as to say:

"We shall all of us die. Why should we not trouble ourselves?" with which he meant to say that he did not find his labour annoying, for the reason that he was doing it for a dying man, and that he hoped that in the proper time some one would do the same for him.

Besides this lie, or in consequence of it, Iván Ilích was most annoyed by this, that no one pitied him the way he wanted to be pitied; at certain moments, after long sufferings, Iván Ilích wanted most of all, however much he was ashamed to acknowledge the fact, that some one should pity him like a sick child. He wanted to be petted, kissed, and fondled, as they pet and console children.