and he whom he expected was coming, and it was not the magistrate, Ivan Matvyeich, but someone else, and yet this other someone was the person whom he was expecting. And the expected One came and called him, and He who now called him was the self-same person who had commanded him to lie on Nikita. And Vasily Andreich was glad that this Someone had called for him. "I am coming!" he cried joyfully. And his own cry awoke him.
And he awoke, but he awoke no longer the man he was when he fell asleep. He would have stood up, but he could not. He would have moved his hand, but he could not. He would have moved his foot, but he could not. He would have turned his head round, and this also he could not do. And he was surprised thereat, but by no means troubled. He understood that this was death, but the thought thereof gave him no anxiety, and he recollected that Nikita lay beneath him, and that he had grown warm and was alive; and it seemed to him as if he were Nikita, and Nikita was he, and that he lived not in himself but in Nikita. He strained his hearing, and could hear the faint breathing of Nikita. "Nikita is alive, and that is the same as my being alive!" he said to himself triumphantly. And a feeling quite new to him, a feeling he had never felt all his life long before, now came over him.
And he bethought him of his money, and his shop, and of his buying and selling, and of the millions of the Mironovs, and it was hard for him to understand why that man whom they called Vasily Brekhunov[1]
- ↑ Himself.
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