his day. Would he care to see people? Or was this gnawing pain
within him too much to permit him to do that?
'I'd like to talk,' said Karenin. 'There must be all sorts of
lively-minded people here. Let them come and gossip with me. It
will distract me-and I can't tell you how interesting it makes
everything that is going on to have seen the dawn of one's own
last day.'
'Your last day!'
'Fowler will kill me.'
'But he thinks not.'
'Fowler will kill me. If he does not he will not leave very much
of me. So that this is my last day anyhow, the days afterwards if
they come at all to me, will be refuse. I know…'
Gardener was about to speak when Karenin went on again.
'I hope he kills me, Gardener. Don't be-old-fashioned. The
thing Iam most afraid of is that last rag of life. I may just go
on-a scarred salvage of suffering stuff. And then-all the
things I have hidden and kept down or discounted or set right
afterwards will get the better of me. I shall be peevish. I may
lose my grip upon my own egotism. It's never been a very firm
grip. No, no, Gardener, don't say that! You know better, you've
had glimpses of it. Suppose I came through on the other side of
this affair, belittled, vain, and spiteful, using the prestige I
have got among men by my good work in the past just to serve some
small invalid purpose…'
He was silent for a time, watching the mists among the distant
precipices change to clouds of light, and drift and dissolve
before the searching rays of the sunrise.
'Yes,' he said at last, 'I am afraid of these anaesthetics and
these fag ends of life. It's life we are all afraid of.
Death!-nobody minds just death. Fowler is clever-but some day
surgery will know its duty better and not be so anxious just to
save something… provided only that it quivers. I've tried to
hold my end up properly and do my work. After Fowler has done
with me Iam certain I shall be unfit for work-and what else is
there for me?… I know I shall not be fit for work…
'I do not see why life should be judged by its last trailing
thread of vitality… I know it for the splendid thing it is-I
who have been a diseased creature from the beginning. I know it
well enough not to confuse it with its husks. Remember that,
Gardener, if presently my heart fails me and I despair, and if I
go through a little phase of pain and ingratitude and dark
forgetfulness before the end… Don't believe what I may say at
the last… If the fabric is good enough the selvage doesn't
matter. It can't matter. So long as you are alive you are just
the moment, perhaps, but when you are dead then you are all your
life from the first moment to the last…'
Section 4
Presently, in accordance with his wish, people came to talk to
him, and he could forget himself again. Rachel Borken sat for a
long time with him and talked chiefly of women in the world, and
with her was a girl named Edith Haydon who was already very well
known as a cytologist. And several of the younger men who were
working in the place and a patient named Kahn, a poet, and
Edwards, a designer of plays and shows, spent some time with him.
The talk wandered from point to point and came back upon itself,
and became now earnest and now trivial as the chance suggestions
determined. But soon afterwards Gardener wrote down notes of
things he remembered, and it is possible to put together again
the outlook of Karenin upon the world and how he thought and felt
about many of the principal things in life.
'Our age,' he said, 'has been so far an age of scene-shifting. We
have been preparing a stage, clearing away the setting of a drama
that was played out and growing tiresome… If I could but sit
out the first few scenes of the new spectacle…
'How encumbered the world had become! It was ailing as Iam
ailing with a growth of unmeaning things. It was entangled,
feverish, confused. It was in sore need of release, and I suppose
that nothing less than the violence of those bombs could have
released it and made it a healthy world again. I suppose they
were necessary. Just as everything turns to evil in a fevered
body so everything seemed turning to evil in those last years of
the old time. Everywhere there were obsolete organisations
seizing upon all the new fine things that science was giving to
the world, nationalities, all sorts of political bodies, the
churches and sects, proprietorship, seizing upon those treat
powers and limitless possibilities and turning them to evil uses.
And they would not suffer open speech, they would not permit of
education, they would let no one be educated to the needs of the
new time… You who are younger cannot imagine the mixture of
desperate hope and protesting despair in which we who could
believe in the possibilities of science lived in those years
before atomic energy came…
'It was not only that the mass of people would not attend, would
not understand, but that those who did understand lacked the
power of real belief. They said the things, they saw the things,
and the things meant nothing to them…
'I have been reading some old papers lately. It is wonderful how