Perhaps it was in order to fortify his defenses against this peril that he determined to buy still more land—as though by enlarging his domain, increasing his fortune, sending his roots down yet deeper into the world of the living, he might find security against death. He read a notice in a newspaper of an estate for sale in the government of Penza, and suddenly decided to go there and negotiate the purchase. He had a little money 011 hand from the sale of War and Peace. On August 31, 1869 he took the train to Moscow (a line had recently been put through from Tula to the capital), and from there he set out, still by train, for Nizhny-Novgorod, where he arrived on September 2. For the remainder of the trip, some two hundred and thirty miles, he had to hire a coach. His favorite servant, Sergey Arbuzov, was with him—a cheer- fill boy, whose excitement at the sights of the country they were crossing communicated itself to his master. Looking out and laughing together, they rolled southward all day long.
At dusk, 'l'olstoy began to doze. His head was heavy, yet he was not sorry to have set out on this long ramble: "I was very anxious," lie later wrote, "to increase our property, and to do so in the cleverest way possible, that is, better than anyone else. ... I had made up my mind that income from crops or sale of timber ought to cover the purchase price, and so the farm itself should cost nothing. I was looking for a seller who was an imbecile with no business sense and it seemed to me that I had found one." As he was calculating his coup, he was suddenly frozen by dread. The night, the jolting, the ghosts of ragged trees along the road. Yasnaya Polyana at the other end of the earth: five hundred miles away! What was he doing here? And what if he fell ill? Far from his home, his family, Sonya! To keep up his spirits, he exchanged a few- words with his servant. But the boy laughed at everything, and his youth and excitability merely deepened Tolstoy's gloom. lie suddenly wanted to be indoors, sec a lighted lamp, a samovar, faces. . . . They were coining into Arzamas. He decided to spend the night there.
The entire town was asleep—a silent, compact, inhospitable wall. The horses' bells rang out harshly between the crowded white houses. At last the inn, with its signpost, big dusty courtyard, dark windows. Sergey leaped out, pounded on the door, woke a servant snoring in the entry- way. "The man," wrote Tolstoy, "had a spot on one cheek and this spot seemed somehow horrible to me."t He asked for a room. The doorkeeper showed him the only one in the establishment. He was checked in the doorway by an uneasy foreboding. It was a large room, square and white. "I recall that I was particularly disturbed by the fact that it was square." The doors and woodwork were painted dark red, a color of dried blood. A table in Karelian birch, an old imitation- leather divan, not very clean, two candles with smoking wicks. While Sergey busied himself with the samovar, Tolstoy stretched out on the divan, a traveling pillow under his head and a rug over his legs. Through the fog in his head he heard the boy calling him to drink his tea, but he no longer wanted to get up or talk or drink; his eyes closed, he let himself drift off to sleep.
lie awoke a short time later, in an empty, black, unfamiliar room, full of the rancid smell of burnt-out candles. "Where am I? Where am
t Eleven years Infer, in 1880, Tolstoy described this night in an unfinished story from which most of the auotations in this chaptcr have been taken. Hut fearing his readers' incredulity, he did not dare to present the text as a description of an actual experience, and entitled it Notes 0/ a Mad/nan.
1 going? What am I running away from?" The questions fell upon him like a flock of ravens. He went out into the hall. Sergey was asleep on a bench, with one arm hanging down, next to the doorkeeper with the sinister spot on his cheek. "I had hoped to get rid of the thing that was tormenting me in the room," wrote Tolstoy. "But it came out behind me and everything turned black. I became more and more frightened." He usually managed to calm himself by making a conscious effort to think rationally. But this time all the tricks he tried in order to regain his self-control only increased his terror.
" This is ridiculous/ I told myself. 'Why am I so depressed? What am I afraid of?'
" 'Of me,' answered Death. 'I am here.'
"A cold shudder ran over my skin. Yes, Death. It will come, it is already here, even though it has nothing to do with me now. . . . My whole being ached with the need to live, the right to live, and, at the same moment, I felt death at work. And it was awful, being torn apart inside. I tried to shake off my terror. I found the stump of a candle in a brass candlestick and lighted it. The reddish flainc, the candle, shorter than the candlestick, all told me the same story: there is nothing in life, nothing exists but death, and death should not be!"
He tried to think about his project, his money, Yasnaya Polyana, his wife, his four children, War and Peace, what he would write next—but they all seemed utterly pointless to him. Horror spread over him, mixed with a deep despair, "as though I were about to vomit." A geometrical horror, implacable, "a square, white and red horror," the horror of the box. What else is a room but a big coffin?
He went back into the hall, where he heard the regular breathing of the two sleepers, and was amazed at their indifference. How could they sleep with Death among them? He was the only person awake on a sinking ship. The boat was going down and the crew were snoring. "I was in agony, but I felt dry and cold and mean. There was not one drop of goodness in me. Only a hard, calm anger against myself and what had made me. . . ." He went back to the room and lay down again. "But what made me? They say God did. . . . God. ... I remembered my prayers. ... I began to pray. ... I invented orisons. ... I crossed myself, I fell on my face, looking sideways for fear that someone might see me. . . ." As he muttered, "Our Father which art in Heaven," he imagined death entering him through every pore of his skin, weakening and rotting his organs, binding his tongue, darkening his brain. No more! ... He rushed out, shook his servant and the doorkeeper; ordered the carriage harnessed. He would not stay one minute longer in that cursed inn for all the money in the world!
While Sergey stumbled out to the stable, he let himself fall onto the couch, closed his eyes and dropped off to sleep. When he awoke it was broad daylight. Sergey, seeing him asleep, had not dared to disturb him. The white and red room had lost its mystery. Tolstoy, rested and calm, could hardly believe he had had his nightmare. A glass of scalding tea and he was himself again.