Page:Complete Works of Count Tolstoy - 18.djvu/72

 As his shirt was being changed, he knew that he would feel more terribly still if he looked at his body, and so he did not look at himself. But all was ended. He put on his morning-gown, covered himself with a shawl, and sat down in a chair to his tea. For a minute he felt himself refreshed, but the moment he began to drink the tea there was again the same taste, and the same pain. He with difficulty finished his glass and lay down, stretching his legs. He lay down, and dismissed Peter.

Again the same. Now a drop of hope would sparkle, and now a sea of despair would be agitated, and all the time the pain, and the pain, and the despondency, and again the same and the same. He felt terribly despondent by himself and wanted to call some one in, but he knew in advance that in the presence of others it would be worse still.

"If I just had some morphine again,—I should forget. I will tell him, the doctor, to think out something else. It cannot go on this way, it cannot."

Thus an hour, two hours pass. But now there is the bell in the antechamber. Perhaps the doctor. Indeed, it is the doctor, fresh, vivacious, fat, jolly, with an expression which seems to say, "Now there you are all frightened, but we will fix it all in a minute." The doctor knows that this expression is of no use here, but he has put it on once for all and cannot take it off, like a man who in the morning puts on his dress coat and goes out calling.

The doctor rubs his hands briskly and in a consoling manner.

"I am cold. It is a cutting frost. Just let me get warmed up," he says with an expression which says that all that is necessary is for him to get warmed up, and as soon as he is warm he will fix it all.

"Well, how is it?"

Iván Ilích feels that the doctor wants to say, "How