Page:Complete Works of Count Tolstoy - 18.djvu/92

 all at once, from two sides, from ten sides, from all sides. They were to be pitied; it was necessary to do something to save them pain, to free them and free himself from these sufferings.

"How good and how simple!" he thought. "And the pain?" he asked himself. "What of it? Well, pain, where are you?"

He began to listen.

"Yes, here it is. Well, let it pain."

"And death? Where is it?"

And he sought his former customary fear of death, and could not find it.

"Where is it? What death?"

There was no fear, because there was also no death.

Instead of death there was a light.

"So this it is!" he suddenly spoke out in a loud voice. "What joy!"

For him all this took place in one moment, and the significance of this moment no longer changed. But for those who were present the agony lasted two hours longer. Something palpitated in his heart, and his emaciated body jerked. Then the palpitation and the râle grew rarer and rarer.

"It is ended!" some one said over him.

He heard these words and repeated them in his soul.

"Death is ended," he said to himself. "It is no more."

He inhaled the air, stopped in the middle of his breath, stretched himself, and died.

March 22, 1886.