Page:Complete Works of Count Tolstoy - 18.djvu/90



this moment there began that cry which lasted for three days and was so terrible that it was not possible to hear it without horror through two doors. At the moment when he answered his wife, he understood that he was lost, that there was no return, that the end had come, the real end, and yet his doubt was not solved,—it remained the doubt it had been.

"Oo! Oo! Oo!" he cried, in various intonations. He had begun to cry, "I do not want to!" and continued to cry the sound "oo."

During the three days, in the course of which time did not exist for him, he fluttered about in that black bag whither an invisible, invincible force was shoving him. He struggled as a prisoner condemned to death struggles in the hands of the hangman, knowing that he cannot be saved; and with every minute he felt that, in spite of all the efforts of the struggle, he was coming nearer and nearer to what terrified him. He felt that his suffering consisted in his being shoved into that black hole, and still more in his not being able to get through it. What hindered him from crawling through was the consciousness of this, that his life was good. This justification of his life grappled him and did not allow him to get on and tormented him more than anything.

Suddenly a certain force pushed him in the chest and in the side, and still more compressed his throat, and he fell into the hole, and there, at the end of the hole, there was some light. What happened to him was what happens in a railway car, when a man thinks that he is