Page:More Tales from Tolstoi.djvu/243



"Why is it all so? Why, indeed? It cannot be! It cannot be that life is so senseless, so hideous? And if it really was so odious and senseless, why die, and die suffering? There is something not right."

Possibly I have not lived as I ought to have lived? flashed through his head. But how can that be when I have always done my duty? And immediately he drove away from him this unique solution of all the riddles of life and death, as if it were something absolutely impossible.

And what do you want now? To live? How? To live as you lived in the Courts when the court-usher announced: "Judgment is going to be delivered!"

"Judgment is coming, judgment is coming," he kept repeating to himself. "Is this the judgment? And I am surely not guilty!" he cried aloud with rage. "What for?" And he ceased to weep, and turning his face to the wall kept thinking continually of one and the same thing: "Wherefore all this horror?"

But think of it as he might, he could find no answer. And when, as it frequently did come, the thought came to him that all this arose from the circumstance that he had not lived as he ought to have lived, he immediately called to mind the regular life he had always led, and drove away that frightful thought.

X.

Another fortnight had passed. Ivan Il'ich was now confined to the divan. He would not lie in