Page 1093 - ANNA KARENINA

Anna Karenina

‘What am I to write to him?’ said Levin. ‘I hope you
are not angry with him?’
‘No, not the least!’ Nikolay answered, vexed at the
question. ‘Tell him to send me a doctor.’

Three more days of agony followed; the sick man was
still in the same condition. The sense of longing for his
death was felt by everyone now at the mere sight of him,
by the waiters and the hotel-keeper and all the people
staying in the hotel, and the doctor and Marya Nikolaevna
and Levin and Kitty. The sick man alone did not express
this feeling, but on the contrary was furious at their not
getting him doctors, and went on taking medicine and
talking of life. Only at rare moments, when the opium
gave him an instant’s relief from the never-ceasing pain, he
would sometimes, half asleep, utter what was ever more
intense in his heart than in all the others: ‘Oh, if it were
only the end!’ or: ‘When will it be over?’
His sufferings, steadily growing more intense, did their
work and prepared him for death. There was no position
in which he was not in pain, there was not a minute in
which he was unconscious of it, not a limb, not a part of
his body that did not ache and cause him agony. Even the
memories, the impressions, the thoughts of this body
awakened in him now the same aversion as the body itself.

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