Page:Complete Works of Count Tolstoy - 18.djvu/87

 "You know yourself that nothing will help me, so let it go."

"We can alleviate your suffering," said the doctor.

"You cannot do that, either,—let it go."

The doctor went into the drawing-room and informed Praskóvya Fédorovna that he was in a very bad state, and that there was one means,—opium,—in order to alleviate the sufferings, which must be terrible.

The doctor said that his physical suffering was terrible, and that was true; but more terrible than his physical suffering was his moral suffering, and in this lay his chief agony.

His moral suffering consisted in this, that on that night, as he looked upon Gerásim's sleepy, good-natured face with its prominent cheek-bones, it suddenly occurred to him, "What if indeed my whole life, my conscious life, was not the right thing?"

It occurred to him that what before had presented itself to him as an utter impossibility, namely, that he had passed all his life improperly, might after all be the truth. It occurred to him that those faint endeavours at struggling against that which was regarded as good by persons in superior positions, faint endeavours which he had immediately repelled from himself, might be real, while everything else might be the wrong thing. He tried to defend all this to himself. And suddenly he felt the weakness of everything which he was defending, and there was nothing to defend.

"And if this is so," he said to himself, "and I go away from life with the consciousness of having ruined everything which was given me, and that it is impossible to mend it, what then?"

He lay down on his back and began to pass his life in review in an entirely new fashion. When, in the morning, he saw the lackey, then his wife, then his daughter, then the doctor, every one of their motions, every word of