V
In this way one month, then a second, passed by. Just before the New Year his brother-in-law arrived in the town on a visit to them. Ivan Ilyitch was at the court when he arrived. Praskovya Fyodorovna had gone out shopping. Coming home and going into his study, he found there his brother-in-law, a healthy, florid man, engaged in unpacking his trunk. He raised his head, hearing Ivan Ilyitch’s step, and for a second stared at him without a word. That stare told Ivan Ilyitch everything. His brother-in-law opened his mouth to utter an “Oh!” of surprise, but checked himself. That confirmed it all.
“What! have I changed?”
“Yes, there is a change.”
And all Ivan Ilyitch’s efforts to draw him into talking of his appearance his brother-in-law met with obstinate silence. Praskovya Fyodorovna came in; the brother-in-law went to see her. Ivan Ilyitch locked his door, and began gazing at himself in the looking-glass, first full face, then in profile. He took up his photograph, taken with his wife, and compared the portrait with what he saw in the looking-glass. The change was immense. Then he bared his arm to the elbow, looked at it, pulled the sleeve down again, sat down on an ottoman, and felt blacker than night.
“I mustn’t, I mustn’t,” he said to himself, jumped up, went to the table, opened some official paper, tried to read it, but could not. He opened the door, went into the drawing-room. The door into the drawing-room was closed. He went up to it on tiptoe and listened.
“No, you’re exaggerating,” Praskovya Fyodorovna was saying.
“Exaggerating? You can’t see it. Why, he’s a dead man. Look at his eyes—there’s no light in them. But what’s wrong with him?”
“No one can tell. Nikolaev” (that was another doctor) “said something, but I don’t know. Leshtchetitsky” (this was the celebrated doctor) “said the opposite.”
Ivan Ilyitch walked away, went to his own room, lay down, and fell to musing. “A kidney—a loose kidney.” He remembered all the doctors had told him, how it had been detached, and how it was loose; and by an effort of imagination he tried to catch that kidney and to stop it, to strengthen it. So little was needed, he fancied. “No, I’ll go again to Pyotr Ivanovitch” (this was the friend who had a friend a doctor). He rang, ordered the horse to be put in, and got ready to go out.
“Where are you off to, Jean?” asked his wife with a peculiarly melancholy and exceptionally kind expression.
This exceptionally kind expression exasperated him. He looked darkly at her.
“I want to see Pyotr Ivanovitch.”
He went to the friend who had a friend a doctor. And with him to the doctor’s. He found him in, and had a long conversation with him.
Reviewing the anatomical and physiological details of what, according to the doctor’s view, was taking place within him, he understood it all. It was just one thing—a little thing wrong with the intestinal appendix. It might all come right. Only strengthen one sluggish organ, and decrease the undue activity of another, and absorption would take place, and all would be set right. He was a little late for dinner. He ate his dinner, talked cheerfully, but it was a long while before he could go to his own room to work. At last he went to his study, and at once sat down to work. He read his legal documents and did his work, but the consciousness never left him of having a matter of importance very near to his heart which he had put off, but would look into later. When he had finished his work, he remembered that the matter near his heart was thinking about the intestinal appendix. But he did not give himself up to it; he went into the drawing-room to tea. There were visitors; and there was talking, playing on the piano, and singing; there was the young examining magistrate, the desirable match for the daughter. Ivan Ilyitch spent the evening, as Praskovya Fyodorovna observed, in better spirits than any of them; but he never forgot for an instant that he had the important matter of the intestinal appendix put off for consideration later. At eleven o’clock he said good night and went to his own room. He had slept alone since his illness in a little room adjoining his study. He went in, undressed, and took up a novel of Zola, but did not read it; he fell to thinking. And in his imagination the desired recovery of the intestinal appendix had taken place. There had been absorption, rejection, reestablishment of the regular action.
“Why, it’s all simply that,” he said to himself. “One only wants to assist nature.” He remembered the medicine, got up, took it, lay down on his back, watching for the medicine to act beneficially and overcome the pain. “It’s only to take it regularly and avoid injurious influences; why, already I feel rather better, much better.” He began to feel his side; it was not painful to the touch. “Yes, I don’t feel it—really, much better already.” He put out the candle and lay on his side. “The appendix is getting better, absorption.” Suddenly he felt the familiar, old, dull, gnawing ache, persistent, quiet, in earnest. In his mouth the same familiar loathsome taste. His heart sank, his brain felt dim, misty. “My God, my God!” he said, “again, again, and it will never cease.” And suddenly the whole thing rose before him in quite a different aspect. “Intestinal appendix! kidney!” he said to himself. “It’s not a question of the appendix, not a question of the kidney, but of life and … death. Yes, life has been and now it’s going, going away, and I cannot stop it. Yes. Why deceive myself? Isn’t it obvious to everyone, except me, that I’m dying, and it’s only a question of weeks, of days—at once perhaps. There was light, and now there is darkness. I was here, and now I am going! Where?” A cold chill ran over him, his breath stopped. He heard nothing but the throbbing of his heart.
“I shall be no more, then what will there be? There’ll be nothing. Where then shall I be when I’m no more? Can this be dying? No; I don’t want to!” He jumped up, tried to light the candle; and fumbling with trembling hands, he dropped the candle and the candlestick on the floor and fell back again on the pillow. “Why trouble? it doesn’t matter,” he said to himself, staring with open eyes into the darkness. “Death. Yes, death. And they—all of them—don’t understand, and don’t want to understand, and feel no pity. They are playing.” (He caught through the closed doors the faraway cadence of a voice and the accompaniment.) “They don’t care, but they will die too. Fools! Me sooner and them later; but it will be the same for them. And they are merry. The beasts!” Anger stifled him. And he was agonisingly, insufferably miserable. “It cannot be that all men always have been doomed to this awful horror! He raised himself.
“There is something wrong in it; I must be calm, I must think it all over from the beginning.” And then he began to consider. “Yes, the beginning of my illness. I knocked my side, and I was just the same, that day and the days after; it ached a little, then more, then doctors, then depression, misery, and again doctors; and I’ve gone on getting closer and closer to the abyss. Strength growing less. Nearer and nearer. And here I am, wasting away, no light in my eyes. I think of how to cure the appendix, but this is death. Can it be death?” Again a horror came over him; gasping for breath, he bent over, began feeling for the matches, and knocked his elbow against the bedside table. It was in his way and hurt him; he felt furious with it, in his anger knocked against it more violently, and upset it. And in despair, breathless, he fell back on his spine waiting for death to come that instant.
The visitors were leaving at that time. Praskovya Fyodorovna was seeing them out. She heard something fall, and came in.
“What is it?”
“Nothing, I dropped something by accident.”
She went out, brought a candle. He was lying, breathing hard and fast, like a man who has run a mile, and staring with fixed eyes at her.
“What is it, Jean?”
“No—othing, I say. I dropped something.”—“Why speak? She won’t understand,” he thought.
She certainly did not understand. She picked up the candle, lighted it for him, and went out hastily. She had to say goodbye to a departing guest. When she came back, he was lying in the same position on his back, looking upwards.
“How are you—worse?”
“Yes.”
She shook her head, sat down.
“Do you know what, Jean? I wonder if we hadn’t better send for Leshtchetitsky to see you here?”
This meant calling in the celebrated doctor, regardless of expense. He smiled malignantly, and said no. She sat a moment longer, went up to him, and kissed him on the forehead.
He hated her with all the force of his soul when she was kissing him, and had to make an effort not to push her away.
“Good night. Please God, you’ll sleep.”
“Yes.”