XI
Another two weeks went by in this way and during that
fortnight an even occurred that Ivan Ilych and his wife had
desired. Petrishchev formally proposed. It happened in the
evening. The next day Praskovya Fedorovna came into her husband's
room considering how best to inform him of it, but that very night
there had been a fresh change for the worse in his condition. She
found him still lying on the sofa but in a different position. He
lay on his back, groaning and staring fixedly straight in front of
him.
She began to remind him of his medicines, but he turned his
eyes towards her with such a look that she did not finish what she
was saying; so great an animosity, to her in particular, did that
look express.
"For Christ's sake let me die in peace!" he said.
She would have gone away, but just then their daughter came in
and went up to say good morning. He looked at her as he had done
at his wife, and in reply to her inquiry about his health said
dryly that he would soon free them all of himself. They were both
silent and after sitting with him for a while went away.
"Is it our fault?" Lisa said to her mother. "It's as if we
were to blame! I am sorry for papa, but why should we be
tortured?"
The doctor came at his usual time. Ivan Ilych answered "Yes"
and "No," never taking his angry eyes from him, and at last said:
"You know you can do nothing for me, so leave me alone."
"We can ease your sufferings."
"You can't even do that. Let me be."
The doctor went into the drawing room and told Praskovya
Fedorovna that the case was very serious and that the only resource
left was opium to allay her husband's sufferings, which must be
terrible.
It was true, as the doctor said, that Ivan Ilych's physical
sufferings were terrible, but worse than the physical sufferings
were his mental sufferings which were his chief torture.
His mental sufferings were due to the fact that that night, as
he looked at Gerasim's sleepy, good-natured face with it prominent
cheek-bones, the question suddenly occurred to him: "What if my
whole life has been wrong?"
It occurred to him that what had appeared perfectly impossible
before, namely that he had not spent his life as he should have
done, might after all be true. It occurred to him that his
scarcely perceptible attempts to struggle against what was
considered good by the most highly placed people, those scarcely
noticeable impulses which he had immediately suppressed, might have
been the real thing, and all the rest false. And his professional
duties and the whole arrangement of his life and of his family, and
all his social and official interests, might all have been false.
He tried to defend all those things to himself and suddenly felt
the weakness of what he was defending. There was nothing to
defend.
"But if that is so," he said to himself, "and I am leaving
this life with the consciousness that I have lost all that was
given me and it is impossible to rectify it -- what then?"
He lay on his back and began to pass his life in review in
quite a new way. In the morning when he saw first his footman,
then his wife, then his daughter, and then the doctor, their every
word and movement confirmed to him the awful truth that had been
revealed to him during the night. In them he saw himself -- all
that for which he had lived -- and saw clearly that it was not real
at all, but a terrible and huge deception which had hidden both
life and death. This consciousness intensified his physical
suffering tenfold. He groaned and tossed about, and pulled at his
clothing which choked and stifled him. And he hated them on that
account.
He was given a large dose of opium and became unconscious, but
at noon his sufferings began again. He drove everybody away and
tossed from side to side.
His wife came to him and said:
"Jean, my dear, do this for me. It can't do any harm and
often helps. Healthy people often do it."
He opened his eyes wide.
"What? Take communion? Why? It's unnecessary! However..."
She began to cry.
"Yes, do, my dear. I'll send for our priest. He is such a
nice man."
"All right. Very well," he muttered.
When the priest came and heard his confession, Ivan Ilych was
softened and seemed to feel a relief from his doubts and
consequently from his sufferings, and for a moment there came a ray
of hope. He again began to think of the vermiform appendix and the
possibility of correcting it. He received the sacrament with tears
in his eyes.
When they laid him down again afterwards he felt a moment's
ease, and the hope that he might live awoke in him again. He began
to think of the operation that had been suggested to him. "To
live! I want to live!" he said to himself.
His wife came in to congratulate him after his communion, and
when uttering the usual conventional words she added:
"You feel better, don't you?"
Without looking at her he said "Yes."
Her dress, her figure, the expression of her face, the tone of
her voice, all revealed the same thing. "This is wrong, it is not
as it should be. All you have lived for and still live for is
falsehood and deception, hiding life and death from you." And as
soon as he admitted that thought, his hatred and his agonizing
physical suffering again sprang up, and with that suffering a
consciousness of the unavoidable, approaching end. And to this was
added a new sensation of grinding shooting pain and a feeling of
suffocation.
The expression of his face when he uttered that "Yes" was
dreadful. Having uttered it, he looked her straight in the eyes,
turned on his face with a rapidity extraordinary in his weak state
and shouted:
"Go away! Go away and leave me alone!"
Part 10, Part 12