Page:More Tales from Tolstoi.djvu/248

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"We haven't done anything. I am sorry for papa, but why should he torment us?"

The doctor came at the usual time. Ivan Il'ich answered him "Yes" and "No," never once ceasing to regard him angrily, and at the end of the interview he said:

"You know very well that nothing can help, so leave it"

"We can relieve the suffering," said the doctor.

"Even that you can't do; leave it"

The doctor went into the drawing-room and told Praskov'ya Thedorovna that things were going very badly, and that there was only one thing—opium — which could relieve his sufferings, which must be terrible.

The doctor said that his physical sufferings were terrible, and that was true; but still more terrible than his physical sufferings were his moral sufferings, and in this was his chief torment

His moral sufferings were due to this circumstance: that night, looking at the sleepy, good-natured face of Gerasim, with its high cheek-bones, it suddenly came into his head: "What if, in very deed, the whole of my life, my conscious life, was not what it ought to be?"

It came into his head that what had seemed to him before an utter impossibility, namely, that he had lived his life not as he ought to have lived it, that this might really be true. It came into his head that those scarcely noticed inclinations of his to fight against that which the most highly placed people regarded as a sovereign good, that those scarcely