Page:Complete Works of Count Tolstoy - 18.djvu/84

 evenly he had been going down-hill, in order that every possibility of hope should be destroyed.

During the last stage of the loneliness in which he was, lying with his face turned to the back of the divan, of that loneliness amidst a populous city and his numerous acquaintances and his family,—a loneliness fuller than which can nowhere be found,—neither at the bottom of the sea, nor in the earth,—during the last stages of this terrible loneliness Iván Ilích lived in his imagination only in the past. One after another there arose before him pictures of his past. They always began with what was nearest in time and ran back to what was most remote, to childhood, and there they stopped. If Iván Ilích thought of the stewed prunes which he was offered to-day to eat, he recalled the raw, wrinkled French prunes of his childhood, their particular taste, and the abundance of saliva when he reached the stone, and side by side with this recollection of the taste there arose a whole series of recollections from that time,—the nurse, the brother, the toys.

"I must not think of this,—it is too painful," Iván Ilích said to himself, and again transferred himself to the present. A button on the back of the divan and wrinkles in the morocco. The morocco is expensive,—not durable,—there was a quarrel on account of it. It was a different kind of morocco, and a different quarrel, when we tore father's portfolio, and were punished, and mother brought us patties." And again his thoughts stopped at his childhood, and again he felt a pain, and tried to dispel it and to think of something else.

And again, together with this train of his recollections, another train of recollections passed through his soul as to how his disease increased and grew. Again it was the same: the farther back, the more there was of life. There was more good in life and more of life itself. Both blended.