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.