“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.