Short Fiction by Leo Tolstoy (book reader for pc TXT) 📕

better, and the medicine has begun to take effect, and now this mischance or disappointment.” And he was furious against the mischance or the people who were causing him the disappointment and killing him, and he felt that this fury was killing him, but could not check it. One would have thought that it should have been clear to him that this exasperation against circumstances and people was aggravating his disease, and that therefore he ought not to pay attention to the unpleasant incidents. But his reasoning took quite the opposite direction. He said that he needed peace, and was on the watch for everything that disturbed his peace, and at the slightest disturbance of it he flew into a rage. What made his position worse was that he read medical books and consulted doctors. He got worse so gradually that he might have deceived himself, comparing one day with another, the difference was so slight. But when he consulted the doctors, then it seemed to him that he was getting worse, and very rapidly so indeed. And in spite of this, he was continually consulting the doctors.

That month he called on another celebrated doctor. The second celebrity said almost the same as the first, but put his questions differently; and the interview with this celebrity only redoubled the doubts and terrors of Ivan Ilyitch. A friend of a friend of his, a very good doctor, diagnosed the disease quite differently; and in spite of the fact that he guaranteed recovery, by his questions and his suppositions he confused Ivan Ilyitch even more and strengthened his suspicions. A homoeopath gave yet another diagnosis of the complaint, and prescribed medicine, which Ivan Ilyitch took secretly for a week; but after a week of the homoeopathic medicine he felt no relief, and losing faith both in the other doctor’s treatment and in this, he fell into even deeper depression. One day a lady of his acquaintance talked to him of the healing wrought by the holy pictures. Ivan Ilyitch caught himself listening attentively and believing in the reality of the facts alleged. This incident alarmed him. “Can I have degenerated to such a point of intellectual feebleness?” he said to himself. “Nonsense! it’s all rubbish. I must not give way to nervous fears, but fixing on one doctor, adhere strictly to his treatment. That’s what I will do. Now it’s settled. I won’t think about it, but till next summer I will stick to the treatment, and then I shall see. Now I’ll put a stop to this wavering!” It was easy to say this, but impossible to carry it out. The pain in his side was always dragging at him, seeming to grow more acute and ever more incessant; it seemed to him that the taste in his mouth was queerer, and there was a loathsome smell even from his breath, and his appetite and strength kept dwindling. There was no deceiving himself; something terrible, new, and so important that nothing more important had ever been in Ivan Ilyitch’s life, was taking place in him, and he alone knew of it. All about him did not or would not understand, and believed that everything in the world was going on as before. This was what tortured Ivan Ilyitch more than anything. Those of his own household, most of all his wife and daughter, who were absorbed in a perfect whirl of visits, did not, he saw, comprehend it at all, and were annoyed that he was so depressed and exacting, as though he were to blame for it. Though they tried indeed to disguise it, he saw he was a nuisance to them; but that his wife had taken up a definite line of her own in regard to his illness, and stuck to it regardless of what he might say and do. This line was expressed thus: “You know,” she would say to acquaintances, “Ivan Ilyitch cannot, like all other simple-hearted folks, keep to the treatment prescribed him. One day he’ll take his drops and eat what he’s ordered, and go to bed in good time; the next day, if I don’t see to it, he’ll suddenly forget to take his medicine, eat sturgeon (which is forbidden by the doctors), yes, and sit up at ‘screw’ till past midnight.”

“Why, when did I do that?” Ivan Ilyitch asked in vexation one day at Pyotr Ivanovitch’s.

“Why, yesterday, with Shebek.”

“It makes no difference. I couldn’t sleep for pain.”

“Well, it doesn’t matter what you do it for, only you’ll never get well like that, and you make us wretched.”

Praskovya Fyodorovna’s external attitude to her husband’s illness, openly expressed to others and to himself, was that Ivan Ilyitch was to blame in the matter of his illness, and that the whole illness was another injury he was doing to his wife. Ivan Ilyitch felt that the expression of this dropped from her unconsciously, but that made it no easier for him.

In his official life, too, Ivan Ilyitch noticed, or fancied he noticed, a strange attitude to him. At one time it seemed to him that people were looking inquisitively at him, as a man who would shortly have to vacate his position; at another time his friends would suddenly begin chaffing him in a friendly way over his nervous fears, as though that awful and horrible, unheard-of thing that was going on within him, incessantly gnawing at him, and irresistibly dragging him away somewhere, were the most agreeable subject for joking. Shvarts especially, with his jocoseness, his liveliness, and his comme-il-faut tone, exasperated Ivan Ilyitch by reminding him of himself ten years ago.

Friends came sometimes to play cards. They sat down to the card-table; they shuffled and dealt the new cards. Diamonds were led and followed by diamonds, the seven. His partner said, “Can’t trump,” and played the two of diamonds. What then? Why, delightful, capital, it should have been⁠—he had a trump hand. And suddenly Ivan Ilyitch feels that gnawing ache, that taste in